We are interested in some of the most fundamental questions about Parkinson’s disease (PD):

• Where and when does PD begin?
• How does the disease spread across the nervous system and contribute to progressive symptoms?
• How many subtypes of PD are there and how can we identify these subtypes using diagnostic markers?

We believe that a better understanding of PD is an essential step towards developing better treatments, disease-modifying therapies, and personalized medicine.

To answer these questions we aim to conduct the hitherto most comprehensive studies of people with PD. We include patients in the early stages of disease and characterize them in detail using several different scanning techniques, clinical measurements, sleep studies, mobile phone apps, and other methods. Patients are then followed for years to study the variable disease development among different patients.

Biological samples from all patients including blood samples, urine, and saliva are stored in our biobank. This provides an invaluable resource for basic science studies and to develop new diagnostic biomarkers, such as the ability to diagnose PD in a blood sample in the future.

We also study tissue samples from the brain and other organs, which we obtain from existing biobanks in Denmark and abroad. This allows us to answer fundamental questions about PD that cannot be studied in living patients with the disease.

For more information about our patient studies, see Patient cohorts.

If you are interested in clinical research, working with Parkinson patients or patient data, please feel free to contact us. We are regularly recruiting PhD students, postdocs, and research year students.