Friday, September 30, 2022

Neurology/Neuroscience Research Seminar

12:00 PM to 1:00 PM

CME credit available, click here

Attendance must be registered within 6 months of attendance to be awarded credit.

Recorded archives of live activities are considered enduring materials.

Viewing of a recorded session is for reference only, no CME credit can be claimed.

Join us

“Mitochondrial and Genetic Contributors to Parkinson Disease Etiology”

Rita Cowell, Ph.D.

Fellow and Chair of Neuroscience
Adjunct Associate Professor of Cell, Developmental, and Integrative Biology,

Mitochondrial dysfunction has been proposed as an etiological contributor to Parkinson Disease (PD) and other neurological disorders, yet attempts to delay disease progression by improving mitochondrial respiration have failed in patients.  Recent evidence suggests that this could be due to a number of factors, including the inability of current strategies to effectively target neuronal metabolism and/or the possibility that dysfunctional non-mitochondrial processes contribute to disease onset and progression. In this seminar, I will present recent evidence from my laboratory indicating the neuroprotective potential of targeting transcriptional regulators for the coordinated enhancement of mitochondrial, synaptic, and autophagy gene programs in a model of Parkinson's Disease. In addition, I will revisit the mitochondrial dysfunction hypothesis in PD by using a novel strategy for cell type-specific localization of disease risk variants and discuss the potential relevance of these findings for designing rational, etiology-centric strategies for therapeutic target identification and drug development studies.