The Genetic Basis of Neurological Disorders

Neurological diseases represent one of the gravest challenges to human in the 21st century, with the prevalence of disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s increasing as populations age across the globe. Over the past thirty years, huge progress has been made in understanding how genetics can influence the onset of... read moreneurological diseases - from dominant Mendelian inheritance through to common genetic variability enhancing lifetime disease risk. This course summarizes our current understanding of the genetics of neurological disorders, providing a detailed grounding in how clinical symptoms and pathology match up to genetic background. For each neurological disease covered, a state- of-the-art report is included on the molecular mechanisms linking disease loci to the cellular etiology of the disorder. This will be complemented with lectures on how the latest genomic and proteomic approaches are helping us develop novel therapeutic avenues of inquiry, with the aim of producing drugs to slow down the degenerative process in these disorders, while highlighting the huge challenges that face the biomedical research community in this area of drug development.