Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that affects 1% of people over age 60 and more than 5 million individuals worldwide. We have collaborated with The Parkinson’s Institute in Sunnyvale, California, to demonstrate how to develop cellular models to identify drugs that may ameliorate the underlying processes of PD, or to understand the environmental factors that impact the development of PD.

Watch Dr. Birgitt Schuele’s presentation on the collaboration with The Parkinson’s Institute

Download the white papers

In a series of white papers, we describe three steps for creating PD cell models using Life Technologies tools:

 

Generating iPSCs (paper 1)

Creating the model systems using donor fibroblasts collected at The Parkinson’s Institute to generate induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), and then characterizing the iPSCs to confirm successful reprogramming.
   
 

NSCs from donor-derived iPSC lines (paper 2)

Generating and characterizing neural stem cells (NSCs) from the PD donor-derived iPSC lines, and then differentiating the NSCs to dopaminergic neurons or other relevant cell types to study the associated cell types involved in PD.
   
 

Genome editing of Parkinson’s disease donor-derived iPSC lines (paper 3)

Performing genomic editing of specific PD-related genes using TAL-based (or other) technologies to study the impact of specific mutations within the genome and develop assays to observe PD-relevant phenotypes of the differentiated cells.