Parkinson’s treatment could be personalized

Patients with Parkinson’s disease react differently to drugs, and the one-size-fits-all pill remains an illusory dream to this day, writes the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in a statement. What’s more, none of the diagnostic methods available at present enable doctors to predict how or whether a patient will respond to the prescribed treatment. 

Protein scientist Paola Picotti intends to change this. As part of the ETH Domain initiative Personalized Health and Related Technologies (PHRT), the professor of Molecular Systems Biology plans to develop biomarkers for early detection and subtype classification of Parkinson’s disease. 

Picotti laid the foundations for her new project a few years ago when she developed a protein measurement method that makes it possible to analyze a patient’s entire set of proteins at a given time, for example during a health check-up – including structural changes in the proteins.  

“Specific proteins often provide an indication of whether an organism is healthy or sick,” explained Picotti.

To help identify biomarkers for use in the early detection and diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, Picotta will now analyze and compare proteins in samples obtained from a large cohort of Dutch patients.  

“We are looking for correlations between structural changes in the proteins and the appearance of symptoms such as loss of cognitive functions,” said Picotti.

Picotti hopes that her study could lead to improved therapy for Parkinson’s treatment as her approach allows researchers to test drug candidates on human tissue and determine how and whether they interact with proteins. This would allow specialists to distinguish between effective and ineffective drugs and help tailor solutions to suit individual patients. 

Most drugs until now are developed in vitro in the laboratory but often fail when used to treat real patients.