SAN FRANCISCO, December 7, 2017 (Newswire.com) – The Gladstone Institutes announced today a new research collaboration with Eli Lilly and Company focused on neurodegenerative diseases. This multi-year, milestone-driven project will be based on a combination of innovative technologies developed at Gladstone by Steve Finkbeiner, M.D., Ph.D. His laboratory will work closely with Lilly during this collaboration.

“This collaboration has high potential to open new avenues towards effective therapies for neurodegenerative diseases,” said Gladstone President R. Sanders Williams, M.D. “Both organizations are committed to meeting this major unmet need.”

Key to the project is a robotic microscope system developed in Finkbeiner’s laboratory with funds from Gladstone, the Taube/Koret Center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research, and the ALS Association. This fully automated platform allows scientists to track thousands of individual cells for days or weeks at a time, and follow discrete cellular functions.

When coupled with neurons generated from induced pluripotent stem cells collected from patients with neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease, and ALS, this microscope becomes a powerful tool to study the cells and their responses to disease and treatments. [Read more…]