"IMMUPARKNET will have the task of pooling the expertise of scholars from 20 different countries. The University of Eastern Piedmont leads the international network of scientists studying the immune system to understand Parkinson's disease, a degenerative disease that affects ten million people worldwide
Parkinson's disease (PD) is a frequent neurodegenerative disorder that affects 10 million people worldwide (600,000 in Europe alone) and whose prevalence is constantly increasing (over 5% of the population over 70 years). The causes and mechanisms leading to Parkinson's disease are quite heterogeneous but the importance of the immune system in this context is now recognised.
The University of Eastern Piedmont is part of an international research team that recently obtained support from the European Union for the IMMUPARKNET (The role of IMMUnity in tackling PARKinson's disease through a Translational NETwork) project, funded by the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) programme.
The University of Eastern Piedmont, represented by Prof. Cristoforo Comi - Professor of Neurology at the UPO Department of Translational Medicine and head of the Neurology Unit at the Sant'Andrea Hospital in Vercelli - is the project leader, which involves researchers from twenty countries: Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Spain Turkey and the United Kingdom, in Europe, as well as scholars working in Chile, Singapore and the United States of America. The UPO facilities involved are those of CAAD, the Centre for Translational Research on Autoimmune and Allergic Diseases.
"IMMUPARKNET", explains Prof. Cristoforo Comi, "is an innovative multidisciplinary network aiming at aggregating around the study of immunity in Parkinson's disease and other neurodegenerative diseases. IMMUPARKNET will represent the first nucleus of a multidisciplinary ecosystem aimed at counteracting the fragmentation of efforts and methodological approaches, both in research and clinical practice, to increase the development of innovative treatments'.
The study of how the immune system is linked to neurodegeneration, which is the cause of Parkinson's disease, is attracting increasing interest; these investigations may provide unprecedented opportunities to better understand the pathogenesis of the disease, to identify clinically significant biomarkers and possibly even new therapeutic strategies."
English (UK) 
Italiano