The eye as a window to the brain: new look on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.

Whilst being the most prevalent neurodegenerative diseases, no treatment for Alzheimer’s (AD) or Parkinson’s disease (PD) is available. This treatment gap is believed to result from the incomplete understanding of AD/PD disease mechanisms, the lack of techniques for patient screening and early diagnosis, and the many hurdles between drug discovery and approval. With this project, we intend to tackle these issues in an innovative way: by studying AD/PD in the mouse retina. This unconventional approach was prompted by the fact that many AD/PD patients experience visual symptoms, and the emerging belief that the eye is a “window to the brain” that can be exploited for diagnosis, disease monitoring, and research. Thanks to its unique opportunities in terms of high-resolution in vivo imaging, testing of electrophysiological and visual function, and manipulability, we can access a wealth of information in the retina that cannot be gathered in any other part of the CNS, but that will likely be translatable to the entire CNS. Employing the latest transgenic AD mouse model and a novel model of PD in the retina, I will perform an extensive characterization of the retinal manifestations of AD/PD. I will focus on the use of in vivo techniques for simultaneous, longitudinal follow-up of different disease processes and generate novel insights into the cellular players contributing to AD/PD. Finally, I will provide proof-of-concept for the retina as a model organ for drug screening.