Study Rationale: Our current molecular understanding of Parkinson’s disease (PD) is based on the clinical phase of the disease. However, because PD is a progressive disease, by the time the disorder is diagnosed, it may be too late to recover from the damage already done. Studies that enable the detection of PD’s initial biological alterations and underlying mechanisms are therefore needed. Our previous work demonstrates the immense opportunity to study the molecular progression of PD throughout all its phases, including the prodromal and preclinical stages, using plasma samples collected from seemingly healthy donors who went on to develop PD later in life.
Hypothesis: We hypothesize that early biological changes in PD can be detected years before clinical diagnosis and that these changes can be monitored over time using deep molecular profiling of plasma samples.
Study Design: The Chronos-PD Pilot study will use a suite of complementary, cutting-edge technologies to analyze the plasma of people who were healthy when they donated, but who developed PD later in life, and compare these samples to those of donors who remained healthy. Our plasma sample analyses can then be used to correlate real-world data — medical information collected outside of experimental studies — with these deep molecular profiles, facilitating community-level assessment of PD.
Impact on Diagnosis/Treatment of Parkinson’s disease: Our results will enhance our understanding of the mechanisms driving the early progression of PD, unveil and prioritize novel drug targets capable of altering the trajectory of the disease, and offer promise for early diagnosis, thereby facilitating the use of interventions that could slow, if not stop, PD progression.
Next Steps for Development: We will validate our early molecular signatures of PD in larger-scale studies and examine their specificity for PD. Outcomes from Chronos-PD will serve as the basis for diagnostic tests and provide targets that could pave the way for developing innovative therapeutics aimed at preventing PD onset and progression.