News

October 2025

• On Friday, October 17, 2025, PO1 Center Investigators gathered at a Symposium to celebrate the many accomplishments of Project II Leader Virginia Lee. Trainees from all eras of her illustrious career gave talks on neurodegeneration and the impact she has had on their careers. 

2025

• Drs. Tropea, Irwin and Weintraub were recently awarded a grant from The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research and its Neuronal Synuclein Disease Endotypes 2024 program for a project titled "Examining the role of concomitant Alzheimer's on alpha-synuclein pathological burden".  The $400,000 grant is examining the role of concomitant Alzheimer's disease pathology on alpha-synuclein pathological burden.  This grant will utilize clinical, biomarker and pathology data from the NIA P01.

June 2025

• Center investigators Alice Chen-Plotkin and George Kannarkat show that alpha-synuclein conformations in plasma may differ between Parkinson's Disease and Dementia with Lewy Bodies. In collaboration with the David Walt lab at Harvard, center investigators develop methods to measure alpha-synuclein in plasma extracellular vesicles. 

May 2025

• Center Investigator Alice Chen-Plotkin, collaborating with Dan Weintraub, Eddie Lee, and Vivianna Van Deerlin, links Parkinson’s disease genetic risk variants to lysosomal biomarker measures..

April 2025

• Core Leader Sharon Xie develops new approaches to Cox regression.

September 2024

• Center Investigator Virginia Lee offers her take on synucleinopathies in a new review in Neuron.” Red text should be linked to take on synucleinopathies in a new review in Neuron.
• Clinical Core Leader Dan Weintraub leads a study investigating long-term dementia risk in Parkinson's disease and finds that dementia in PD occurs less frequently, or later in the disease course, than previous studies have indicated. 

March 2024

• Center Investigator David Irwin, collaborating with Alice Chen-Plotkin, Virginia Lee, Eddie Lee, and Dan Weintraub, investigates tau maturation in Lewy body disease and Alzheimer’s disease with digital histology.

Our program is funded by the National Institute on Aging. You can read the full article here.