My area of research is Parkinson’s disease, and my post allows 50% dedicated research time for my work in this area. The other half of my work is as a practising clinical neurologist for the NHS. The main purpose of my work is to investigate why Parkinson’s disease evolves differently in different people.
If we look at people with Parkinson’s who have been diagnosed at the same time and compare them 10 years later, we find that they will have developed quite different symptoms at different rates. Some individuals may have problems restricted to issues with movement control which can be well managed with medication, whereas others will develop significant memory and balance problems at an early stage in their disease which are much more difficult to treat.
We are investigating the underlying reasons for these differences, by looking into biological variation between individuals with different types of Parkinson’s, and in particular we are looking at variations in their immune responses. We hope that this will ultimately lead us to new ways of treating the disease with therapies targeted at the immune system.