UC Gardner Neuroscience Institute receives $3.8M donation | News – The News Record

The 114,000-square-foot UC Gardner Neuroscience Institute is home for 125 physicians who specialize in neuroscience.

The University of Cincinnatis Gardner Neuroscience Institute has received a $3.8 million gift to fund a study that aims to change the way neurologists and clinicians think about neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinsons and Alzheimers.

The 5,000-patient study is the first to analyze biomarkers substances found in organisms that indicate the presence of disease in an effort to treat patients molecular abnormalities individually rather than treating them together as symptoms of a larger disease.

This biomarker profiling is meant to allow neurologists and clinicians a way to diagnose patients early and offer more preventative treatments.

The donation was provided by the James J. and Joan A. Gardner Family Foundation, which shares its namesake with the institute. This is the third major donation given to UC by the foundation. The Gardners were Cincinnati philanthropists and benefactors of UCs research into neurodegenerative diseases.

Joan Gardner lived with Parkinsons disease for years before passing away last September at the age of 86. Her husband, James Gardner, served as vice president and general manager at the Cintas Corporation. He died in 2007.

My father wanted to eradicate this disease for my mother, said Peggy Johns, daughter of James and Joan Gardner in a press release. We hope that findings from this study will shed light on the many causes of neurodegenerative diseases and bring us light-years forward in finding a cure or cures.

Parkinsons and Alzheimers are the two most common types of neurodegenerative diseases, according to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). Nearly 5.4 million Americans were afflicted with Alzheimers disease in 2016, and its estimated that roughly 930,000 people could be diagnosed with Parkinsons disease by 2020.

Its time we completely rethink what we do and thats essentially what this study is about, said Dr. Alberto Espay, director of UCs GardnerCenterfor Parkinson's Disease and Movement Disorders. We are moving the direction of research in a manner thats in fact reverse to that which we have used for decades.

The field of neurology should be challenging its underlying assumptions about how these diseases are diagnosed and treated, according to Espay. Biologically, Parkinsons is not one but many diseases, he explained.

We will never cure Parkinsons, we will never cure Alzheimers, but we can begin to cure smaller, well-defined, better characterized molecular subtypes of these diseases, said Espay, citing the field of oncology as a model of success in breaking down the treatment of sophisticated diseases to the molecular level.

Researchers plan to make the study representative of Cincinnatis population by analyzing 4,000 patients with neurodegenerative diseases while using 1,000 healthy, similarly aged subjects as a control group.

The study will be a collaboration of experts from UC and elsewhere.

Espay, who laid the foundation for this project in early 2015, said the $3.8 million donation was critical to complete the funding to get the entire program off the ground. Although the program will require much more money eventually, Espay said he is confident more funds will roll in once the project takes off.

I think that this is going to keep us occupied for the rest of our professional lives, but we welcome the challenge and know that this is what we have to do, he said.

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UC Gardner Neuroscience Institute receives $3.8M donation | News - The News Record