Researchers at UTHealth Houston have been awarded a three-year, $7.8 million grant from the Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s initiative to support projects that will help better understand how Parkinson’s disease occurs in the brain.
The funding was awarded in partnership with The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research to expand their Collaborative Research Network, a global research initiative that emphasizes collaboration and data sharing across health research entities with the goal of advancing diagnosis and treatment of Parkinson’s.
UTHealth Houston will serve as the main research site in collaboration with the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of Toronto; and the Banner Health Institute.
Claudio Soto, PhD, director of The George and Cynthia Mitchell Center for Research in Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Brain Disorders at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston, will serve as the lead principal investigator under the award.
“We hope that this project will let us understand how the disease happens in the brain and how the brain becomes damaged,” said Soto, who is also a professor of neurology and the Huffington Foundation Distinguished Chair in Neurology at the medical school. “We want to understand the proteins and the cellular pathways that are involved in brain damage so that we can eventually come up with novel strategies for intervention.”
Parkinson’s disease is the second most common neurodegenerative disease after Alzheimer’s. More than 1.1 million people in the U.S. are affected by Parkinson’s, with 90,000 people diagnosed each year, according to the Parkinson’s Foundation .
Soto said the grant will allow his team to expand on studies he previously conducted using a technique developed in his lab that mimics the brain processes underlying Parkinson’s. This technique, known as the seed amplification assay, has high potential for early diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. In 2024, Soto was awarded the Robert A. Pritzker Prize for Leadership in Parkinson’s Research by The Michael J. Fox Foundation for the invention and development of this technology.
Soto said he hopes that access to the Collaborative Research Network’s resources will allow UTHealth Houston to make significant advances in understanding the neurodegenerative disease.
“When Aligning Science Across Parkinson's selects you, you become part of this club with the best scientists worldwide and get access to the resources, facilities, materials, and expertise that they have available,” Soto said.
Research projects under the award will begin June 1, with the possibility of a funding extension after three years.
Additional researchers from the The George and Cynthia Mitchell Center for Research in Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Brain Disorders include Fei Wang, PhD, who will serve as an early-stage investigator on projects under the award, and senior researcher Sofia Elizabeth Sepulveda Contreras, PhD.