By: Caitlin Kingsmill, News Writer
In July, researchers at SFU’s Verheyen Lab and the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas identified a gene that may reverse symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. The Verheyen lab was exploring the role of a gene known as “Cdk8” in fruit flies and its human counterpart gene “CDK19” when they discovered a connection to Parkinson’s. The neurodegenerative disease is currently incurable and affects one in 500 Canadians.
Researchers found that by decreasing the amount of the Cdk8 gene present in the fruit flies, the flies developed movement impairments associated with Parkinson’s. However, their impairments were reduced when researchers “put more of the fly Cdk8 or human CDK19 gene into cells.”
“This function involves helping cells get rid of defective mitochondria which is a function that is impaired in Parkinsonism,” Esther Verheyen, professor of molecular biology and biochemistry at SFU, told Global News.
According to the Parkinson’s Foundation, Parkinsonism is “a set of movement symptoms associated with Parkinson’s disease and other disorders.” Individuals with Parkinsonism may have stiffness, difficulty walking and balancing, and tremors. Symptoms can include “mood and thinking changes, speech problems, and sleep disturbances.”
In an interview with The Peak, Verheyen discussed the research and the team behind it as corresponding author of the paper. She said Jenny Zhe Liao, an SFU PhD student and co-lead author of the study “really took the lab in a new direction with this work” and that “this was a really big accomplishment for her.”
The paper’s other co-lead author is Hyunglok Chung, a PhD student, and Hugo J Bellen, a professor of molecular and human genetics, is the other corresponding author. Verheyen explained SFU’s collaboration with these two researchers from the Baylor College of Medicine, saying, “We realized there was some overlap in research interests with a lab in Texas, and so we reached out to them and started collaborating with them on the project.”
The Verheyen lab has been working on this research for several years, though they did not originally set out to find a potential Parkinson’s treatment. “We stumbled into it the way genetics research often is — you find something that you weren’t expecting,” shared Verheyen. When the research began, the goal was to better understand the functions of the Cdk8 gene. The team pivoted once they made the connection to Parkinson’s disease, which Verheyen described as a “lightbulb moment.”
This is the first research to establish a connection between the Cdk8 gene and Parkinson’s. With the paper now published in Nature Communications, Verheyen said she is “hoping that the larger scientific community that works on this could [ . . . ] collectively move it forward.
“Our work with Cdk8 changed how the mitochondria act and made them change in a way that helped with Parkinson’s features,” explained Verheyen. These findings “could help with other diseases that also impact how mitochondria work.”
There is always a lag between conducting research in a model organism like a fruit fly and advancing that research into human cells. However, a treatment for Parkinson’s may lie in existing drugs through a process called drug repurposing.
“Here at SFU, we have this great screening center where you can do drug screenings. We could look for drugs that might somehow help a cell make more Cdk8,” said Verheyen. “Sometimes there are drugs that were developed for one purpose but then found to have another effect.”
