A step towards curing Parkinson's disease

Jour fixe talk by Volodymyr Shvadchak on 13 November 2018

Volodymyr Shvadchak is a Researcher at the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry, Prague, Czech Republic.

Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases are two most-common neurodegenerative disorders. Both of them affect predominantly aged people, both of them are connected to protein misfolding, and both of them, unfortunately, are yet incurable. In his work Volodymyr focuses on one of possible approaches to stop or delay progression of those diseases, namely, on suppressing misfolding of proteins into amyloid fibrils. He is designing compounds able to stop growth of amyloid fibrils composed of α‑synuclein, the main component of pathological inclusions during Parkinson's disease. If the development of such drugs is successful, in the future they will allow blocking Parkinson's disease progression at early stages.