MSU Researcher Gets NIH Grant for Parkinson's Disease Work
Saturday, July 24, 2010
ANN ARBOR, MI (MICHIGAN RADIO) - A Michigan State University researcher is working on new treatments for Parkinson's disease.
Dr. John Goudreau says a protein known as "parkin" can save certain neurons in the brain from injury caused by Parkinson's disease.
The associate professor of neurology, pharmacology and toxicology is using a $1.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to explore his theory.
Goudreau uses a boxing analogy.
"So you have a couple of prizefighters," Goudreau says. "One gets hit and goes down to the mat and can't get up. These other cells that seem to be resistant to the disease take the same kind of hit, they go down to the mat, but they can bounce back up again and again. So we wanted to figure out why they were able to do that."
About four million people worldwide have Parkinson's disease. Goudreau says that's expected to increase to more than 8 million by the year 2030.