Brain Research New Zealand is very pleased to report that it has made a further set of grant awards, for short-term projects running in the first half of 2021. While these grants are necessarily short-term due to the Centre of Research Excellence winding up after June...
Parkinsons Disease
The link between Covid and Parkinson’s
Dr Victor Dieriks examines concerns that the rapid onset of Parkinson's disease motor symptoms after Covid-19 infection suggests a causal link. Since the start of this pandemic, neuroscientists have become increasingly concerned that Covid-19 could result in...
Stalling Parkinson’s disease is Auckland scientist’s goal
What if doctors could stall Parkinson's before the shakiness started? That's the ambition of a University of Auckland scientist. Brain Research New Zealand member Dr Victor Dieriks, of the Centre for Brain Research in the Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, just...
$1.2m Funding Boost For Parkinson’s Disease Study
University of Canterbury-led research that could help Parkinson’s disease patients learn more about their risk of dementia has received a million-dollar funding boost. The Health Research Council of New Zealand (HRC), a Crown agency, has awarded a project grant of...
Your nose: the window to your brain
The nose and sense of smell provide early indicators of Covid-19 and neurodegenerative diseases, and could be important in determining the cause of diseases, writes Professor Maurice Curtis of the University of Auckland. Have you ever experienced a momentary smell...
‘Crazy’ idea leads to brain disease breakthrough
How a hunch led to a new way to grow human brain cells in the lab to investigate an array of challenging disorders. When it comes to the brain disorders that occur with ageing – Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases – there is no cure. The illnesses are...
Dr Tracy Melzer: Half a Million to Study Dementia and Parkinson’s Disease
Dr Tracy Melzer is a medical physicist with a sub-speciality in brain imaging techniques. His work involves looking at the brain using imaging technologies like MRI. In 2016 Tracy won the Sir Charles Hercus Health Research Fellowship. The fellowship awarded Tracy a...
Optogenetics Lights the Way Forward for Parkinson’s Patients
Dr Louise Parr-Brownlie is a neurophysiologist, lecturer, and one of the few researchers in the world dedicated to researching optogenetics. Optogenetics is a technique that uses light to control the activity of cells in living tissue. These cells are genetically...
Targeting Drug Delivery Within the Brain
This article was originally published by the BHRC [http://www.otago.ac.nz/bhrc/otago652708.pdf] Sometimes, great research starts as an impossible dream. At least, that’s how John Reynolds’ Parkinson’s disease treatment project began. Current methods of treating the...
The Genes Behind Dyskinesia
This article was originally post by the BHRC [http://www.otago.ac.nz/bhrc/news/otago628517.html] Parkinson’s disease is an increasingly prevalent problem. The disease, which current affects millions of individuals worldwide, causes a progressive loss of motor...