Michael Bassik

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disease, characterized by progressive motor deficits such as tremor, muscle stiffness, and slowness of movement, and affects 6 million worldwide. Despite ongoing efforts to discover the mechanisms underlying this disease, PD remains an incurable disorder.

The Stanford Brain Rejuvenation Project is an initiative by leading aging researchers, neuroscientists, chemists, and engineers to understand the basis of brain aging and rejuvenation and how they relate to neurodegeneration.

There is one characteristic of all neurodegenerative diseases: the accumulation and aggregation of abnormal proteins in the patient’s brain. These aggregations are thought to induce neuronal cell death and brain degeneration.