Turkish scientists will play a role in early diagnosis of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases

Erciyes University (ERÜ) Faculty of Medicine, Department of Biostatistics, Faculty Member Prof. Dr. Gökmen Zararsız said that many clinical studies are being conducted around the world for the treatment of Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and other neurodegenerative diseases.

While there are currently some treatments used for Parkinson's, drug studies for Alzheimer's are currently at the basic research level, Zararsız said, adding that studies in this direction are ongoing.

Stating that Europe has a joint research initiative on these diseases called JPND (Joint Programme on Neurodegenerative Disease Research), Zararsız gave the following information:

"This research initiative was created within the framework of Horizon 2020 (a programme that supports technology development and research projects and allocates funds for projects) and is supported by institutions in each European country. This research initiative, which focuses on problems related to neurodegenerative diseases, calls for specific themes every year.

It also provides various funds within these themes. Last year, a call was made on a theme to better understand the mechanism in the early stages of diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and to diagnose their progression. A budget of 18 million euros was allocated within the scope of this call. There were many applications from across Europe and only 10 consortia were entitled to receive support. The consortium in which we were also a part of was one of the 10 projects. This is a great pride for us."

"We will try to find solutions to the identified problems"

Zararsız stated that the 3-year project is being carried out under the coordination of the Neurodegenerative Research Center in Germany, and that in addition to ERÜ, the Pasteur Institute and Imagine Institute from France and the Amsterdam University Medical Center from the Netherlands are also taking part in the project.

Zararsız, who touched on the purpose of the project, said, "We aim to obtain comprehensive data to determine cellular changes in the early stages of diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and to predict their progression. In this way, very comprehensive genetic data will be obtained to obtain findings regarding the progression of diseases and new treatment mechanisms. All of this large genetic data obtained will come to our university. We will analyze this data and try to find solutions to the identified problems."

Data coming from various countries will be processed on the server in ERÜ

Harmless stated that the genetic data currently obtained with new generation technologies is quite large in size and that it is not possible to analyze them on standard computers.

Emphasizing that all patient tissue and cellular model data obtained from other partners in this consortium will be brought to their universities, Zararsız said, "We have a high-capacity server system at the ERÜ Drug Application Research Center. Our research group will perform all of these analyses on the high-capacity server system within our group. In this context, we will further improve our research opportunities. By increasing the capacity of our server, we will perform analyses more effectively in both this project and subsequent projects."

Zararsız added that Assoc. Prof. Dr. Gözde Ertürk Zararsız from ERU Faculty of Medicine, lecturer Ahu Cephe, postdoctoral researchers and graduate students also took part in the project, which has a budget of approximately 1 million 262 thousand euros.