About the Special Issue

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a progressive neurological disorder. It is the second most common neurodegenerative disease after Alzheimer’s disease. PD is characterized by motor symptoms including tremor, rigidity, bradykinesia, and postural instability but also by non-motor symptoms as fatigue, depression, sleep disturbance, and dementia. The specific degeneration of midbrain dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra as well as the appearance of aggregated forms of the protein alpha-Synuelcien are key hallmarks of PD.

Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) hold great promise for the development of novel, disease relevant and personalized models for PD. The high differentiation potential of human iPSCs into dopaminergic neurons, but also into all other cell types of the midbrain makes them an attractive starting material for the development of in vitro models for PD. Recent work has shown that patient specific iPSC derived cellular models recapitulate the key hallmarks of the disease. Furthermore, it becomes more and more evident that other cells types beyond dopaminergic neurons, including e.g. astroglia and microglia, play an important role in onset and progression of the disease.

In this special issue we are aiming at articles discussing different kinds of in vitro models for PD. We will include original research articles reporting novel findings as well as reviews covering the currently published research in this area. 

Keywords: Parkinson’s disease, in vitro disease modeling, cellular models, stem cells, iPSC, neurodegeneration

Call for Papers