Cells die. A chemical goes missing. Proteins mutate. On the surface, serious neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s (cells) and Parkinson’s (chemical) look pretty easy to figure out. But learning why they occur has been extremely difficult. And, unfortunately, beneficial therapies have proven, to this point at least, elusive.

As our population ages, neurodegenerative diseases will become even more common. And tragic. We need to understand more about how brain cells keep functioning in healthy brains as well as why they die or otherwise fail in diseased ones.

Research at The Jackson Laboratory investigates a wide variety of brain function as well as malfunction, with the goal of going beyond the surface of neurodegeneration and discovering its underlying causes