What is the Parkinsons Institute and how was it started?
The Parkinson’s Institute is a nonprofit organization that represents a unique blend of clinical research, basic research and day-to-day patient care. We have one of the largest movement disorders clinics in north America, but also have a full basic research laboratory where almost every aspect of the disease is under study. What’s quite powerful about this approach is that discoveries in the laboratory can quickly be translated to the clinic and vice versa — observations in the clinic can be taken to the laboratory for further study. So it is a very effective way to do disease-oriented research and from that standpoint it’s a fairly unique organization. How long has the Institute been in existence? This is our tenth anniversary. We were founded in 1988. We started in a small one-room trailer but have since developed into a fully integrated, multidisciplinary institute with a mission of finding the cause and cure of Parkinson’s disease. Would you give us a definition of Parkinson’s di
