Parkinson’s Disease is a debilitating neurodegenerative brain disorder that gets worse over time and affects millions of people all over the world. Now a new study published today reveals a risk gene for Parkinson’s Disease (PD) that could be a possible therapeutic target.

Researchers report that computational, cell biological, and human tissue studies show that GPNMB is a risk gene for Parkinson’s Disease (PD) and a possible therapeutic target.

PD is a debilitating neurodegenerative brain disorder that gets worse over time and affects millions of people all over the world. Often, the condition is diagnosed based on the presence of motor control symptoms, which typically manifest decades into the disease’s course.

Therefore, there is a pressing need to not only comprehend PD’s pathophysiology better but also to create a panel of biomarkers that could predict who is at risk for PD before serious neurodegeneration takes place.

Although more than 80 genetic loci have been identified by genome-wide association studies (GWAS) as contributing to the risk for Parkinson’s disease (PD), the target genes and the biological mechanisms connected to them are still mostly unknown.

A-synuclein (aSyn), the primary component of disease-defining neuropathological lesions, has been studied as a potential therapeutic target up to this point.

These efforts, though, have not yet yielded any results. Maria Diaz-Ortiz and her colleagues looked at one PD GWAS risk locus on chromosome 7 and linked it to the Glycoprotein Nonmetastatic Melanoma Protein B transmembrane protein (GPNMB).

Diaz-Ortiz et al. did a number of experiments to find that GPNMB interacts with aSyn and that this interaction is both necessary and sufficient for the uptake of fibrillar forms of aSyn and the development of aSyn pathology in cells.

Also, the authors found that there were higher levels of GPNMB in plasma samples from nearly 800 PD patients with early symptoms and advanced stages of the disease and that these levels increased as the disease progressed.

According to this finding, GPNMB may serve as a useful biomarker for the development of diseases.

Image Credit: Getty

You were reading: A Valuable Biomarker For Parkinson’s Disease Identified