In this World Parkinson's Day Special Episode Julie and Helga look back at a selection of the diverse range of Parkinson's research projects the podcast has featured.

Listen for news about some big changes ahead for the podcast which is now listened to in more than seventy countries worldwide.

This World Parkinson's Day Julie and Helga's message is 'Together we can all help research projects progress towards new treatments and a cure. Volunteer to take part today!'

Professor Heather Mortiboys, Head of Neuroscience and Deputy Dean of the School of Medicine and Population Health at the University of Sheffield is pushing the boundaries of Parkinson's research and drug discovery from every direction. With a particular focus on mitochondria, she has been at the cutting edge of pre-clinical and clinical research, working with cells to develop to models for testing drug compounds. Heather champions public and patient involvement throughout her work and is also deeply committed to mentorship and education, and dedicates significant time to early-career researchers.

Parkinson's UK Virtual Biotech launched in 2017 funded by donors from across the world, with the aim of speeding up research to reduce the timescale for finding new treatments from decades down to years.

Over £130m has been invested in high-potential early-stage projects, many of which are now 'coming-of-age' and in the final stages of clinical trials.

Dr Lynsey Bilsland is the new Managing Director at the helm of the Virtual Biotech, and the person who's going to lead it into its exciting next phase. Julie and Helga met Lynsey to find out more about her new role and what lies ahead.

To start the fourth series of the podcast we are turning our focus towards the much neglected area of mental health related research. Just over a year ago Becca Hunsdon from the University of Reading began recruiting participants for her PhD project ‘Moving Forward’, exploring a new online group programme she’d developed to offer psychological support and improve quality of life for people with Parkinson’s. Podcast co-presenter Helga Macfarlane volunteered to take part having never been involved in anything like it before. Over the following eight weeks she found huge value in Becca’s sessions, so along with podcast host Dr Julie Jones invited her into the studio to find out the thinking behind its group based online set-up and how, with her own psychotherapy input weaved throughout, it explores mood, emotions and coping, and reconnects participants with their values to support them through unhelpful thoughts and feelings.

Landmark is a ground-breaking research programme aimed at accelerating the search for new treatments by applying cutting edge techniques to gain a new level of insight at cellular level into the changes Parkinson's causes in the brain. Principal investigator Professor Michael Johnson from Imperial College London explains the need across the global research community for the new high quality datasets his team will produce.

The project will use tissue samples from the Parkinson's UK Brain Bank, which was set up 22 years ago as a result of the remarkable foresight of Professor David Dexter, who is now the charity's Director of Research. He explains what it was like to see his vision come to fruition when Landmark was launched.

The three year research programme brings together a Parkinson's UK led consortium of four major pharmaceutical companies - GSK, Novartis, Roche, and UCB, plus Imperial College London, which was made possible with £4m of funding from the Gatsby charitable foundation.

https://profiles.imperial.ac.uk/m.johnson

The ground-breaking Predict-PD study has been gathering valuable information from thirteen thousand volunteers for 15 years, in an effort to find ways of identifying those people most at risk of developing Parkinson’s. We catch up with progress so far and find out how the project is continually growing and swapping information with other researchers as science moves ever closer towards the establishing the causes of the world’s fastest growing neurological disorder.

Dr Alastair Noyce, the Principal Investigator, is Professor of Neurology and Neuroepidemiology at the Queen Mary University of London.

If you are interested in volunteering to take part or just want to find out more, you can do so using this link:

https://predictpd.com/en

We are delighted to be focusing this month's episode on a research project that is actively recruiting patient participants all across the UK. The investigation, based at University College London, is looking at whether a medicine currently used to treat nausea and vomiting caused by some cancer treatments, could also help people with Parkinson's and Lewy Body Dementia who experience hallucinations.

Read Maria and Desmond's experience of taking part in the Top Hat trial:

Blog: https://www.parkinsons.org.uk/research/research-blog/ask-expert/research-reduce-hallucinations-desmond-and-marias-story

#Link to Take Part Hub recruitment page: https://www.parkinsons.org.uk/research/top-hat-trial-licensed-drug-parkinsons-hallucination-treatment