Advancing precision medicine for Parkinson’s

Precision medicine is a tailored approach to healthcare that uses a person’s unique genetics, family history and lifestyle to predict, prevent, and treat diseases, rather than using a one-size-fits-all approach.

This will lead to a range of medicines that target the root cause of the disease in individuals.

Understanding what it’s like to live with Parkinson’s is central to our research. Our consumer team, people who live with Parkinson’s, actively contribute to, and shape, our work as an integral part of our team.

Their sharing of their experiences offers our researchers invaluable insights into the physical, emotional, and social impacts of Parkinson’s ensuring in our work addresses the questions that matter to the Parkinson’s community.

Traditionally, scientific progress has been slow because it operated in deeply siloed, highly specialised approach with little cross-pollination of ideas.

Our multidisciplinary approach combines a lived experience of Parkinsons with clinical partnerships such as movement disorder neurologists, as well as researchers who are leaders in their fields of structural and neuronal biology, medicinal chemistry, genomics and protein degradation to accelerate discoveries into new drugs and diagnostic tests.

We have a network of connected consumers (people with a lived experience of Parkinson’s) across Australia to work alongside researchers sharing insights that help shape research priorities and ensure projects remain focused on the needs of the community.

Consumers contribute to research design, communication and decision-making, helping our researchers better understand the diverse experiences of Parkinson’s. Their perspectives strengthen the centre’s precision medicine approach and help guide research towards new therapies that can improve quality of life and, ultimately, slow or stop disease progression.

We have established working groups to coordinate activity across the centre.

• Clinical: align cohorts (groups of people taking part in research) so studies can be compared and combined.
• Genomics: align goals for analysing genetic and related data across cohorts and public datasets.
• Research funding: develop a fair and transparent way to allocate research funding aligned to centre goals.