Coming Soon – Brain Fables

Billions of dollars have been spent trying to tackle Parkinson’s disease, this is the result thus far…

Failure after failure after failure. The hope after all that money and effort spent is that we are at least learning from our mistakes and building towards therapies that will one day allow those diagnosed with Parkinson’s to live better lives, but are we?

The key takeaway from all of those painful lessons is that we can no longer try to treat diseases like Parkinson’s as if they are one disease. We need to start doing whatever it takes to properly sub-type those diagnosed into biologically determined cohorts and address each, one at a time.

However, of the 74 disease-modifying trials in development for Parkinson’s disease, only 8 target a biological subset. Why? Because for decades neurology has assumed that what is seen in the clinic will match nicely onto something we can measure in biology.

It is time to truly embrace the idea that there are likely dozens of biological pathways that lead to degenerative brain diseases and that we must find and target each separately if we are ever going to get therapies that can alter the disease process.

That, in a nutshell is the driving message behind Brain Fables. It is the story, told through the lens of a patient and a doctor, of the mistakes we have made in our attempts to tackle diseases of brain aging, and what needs to be done to put ourselves on the right track.

Written by myself and Dr. Alberto Espay, and published by Cambridge University Press,  it is scheduled to be released in spring of 2020. Pre-orders will be available within in the next couple of months and I’ll be sending more information about it in the weeks to come.