Nowadays in neurology we’re separating neurodegenerative conditions out into proteinopathies. So Parkinson’s disease, for example, is caused by alpha-synuclein protein becoming misfolded and causing problems. And so it’s an alpha-synucleinopathy I guess. Multiple system atrophy is similar and we’ll be talking about that with Wendy Phillips in our session. I have a large regional clinic in Southampton, which I do with a few colleagues, Luke Massey and Jade Donnelly...
Nowadays in neurology we’re separating neurodegenerative conditions out into proteinopathies. So Parkinson’s disease, for example, is caused by alpha-synuclein protein becoming misfolded and causing problems. And so it’s an alpha-synucleinopathy I guess. Multiple system atrophy is similar and we’ll be talking about that with Wendy Phillips in our session. I have a large regional clinic in Southampton, which I do with a few colleagues, Luke Massey and Jade Donnelly. And we see people with progressive supranuclear palsy and corticobasal syndrome, as well as multiple system atrophy, and those are tauopathies. So in those conditions, the tau protein which is usually used for to bolster microtubules which enable transport of chemicals around the nerve cell, that tau that’s usually used for microtubules becomes phosphorylated and misfolded and causes problems in the nerve cell. People may have heard of Alzheimer’s disease, which is obviously a very common disease and that’s an example of a secondary tauopathy, which is where amyloid caused problems first and then tau causes problems later. And so treatments and biomarkers for tauopathies are going to be useful for Alzheimer’s disease, but also for rare diseases such as progressive supranuclear palsy and corticobasal degeneration as I work in. There are other tauopathies as well, but they’re largely a little bit less prevalent I guess. But those are the main neurodegenerative tauopathies that we would think about.
