Parkinson's Queensland recently awarded 3 x $10,000 scholarships to Queensland PhD students who are undertaking important research into elements of Parkinson's Disease that will make a substantial difference for people living with Parkinson's in the medium term.

Our second grant recipient is Eugenia Ferreiro from the Queensland Brain Institute, a third year PhD student at the Molecular Biology laboratory at the Queensland Brain Institute, University of Queensland. In her project, Eugenia is focused on studying a novel genetic factor that emerged as a potential driver of cell death in these neurons: the retrotransposon LINE-1. She discovered that the most resilient population of dopaminergic neurons in PD patients has lower LINE-1 expression, which suggests that the neurons with high LINE-1 expression are lost during disease progression.

With the support of Parkinson’s Queensland, Eugenia plans to study whether blocking LINE-1 activity in human dopaminergic neurons offers a protective effect and improves neuronal survival.

To learn more about Eugenia's Parkinson's Research Project, make sure you continue watching until the end!

00:27 - Introduction
00:39 - Eugenia's background
01:25 - Information about Eugenia's Research Project
02:57 - The importance of Eugenia's Project