PerkinElmer

Neuroscience Research

Many prominent scientists, philosophers, and artists alike are mesmerized by the brain, likening this 3 lbs of matter to a computer, a great factory, a beautiful mess, a world of unknown territory, or the most complicated object in the known universe, among other descriptors. Neuroscience researchers collectively study the complex structure and function of the nervous system, including the brain, using some of the most exciting analytical, cellular and molecular biology, and imaging technologies to help elucidate mechanisms that may help better explain disease development and aid in potential drug discovery for neurological disorders. Among these, neurodegenerative diseases – where nerve cells in the brain or peripheral nervous system loses function over time eventually leading to cell death or synaptic alternations that cause a cessation of normal organ function - are thought to affect millions of people worldwide, especially as the global world population ages. Researchers everywhere are furiously working to understand the inner biological processes behind complex yet ubiquitous diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, ALST/FTD, as well as rare diseases of neurological nature.

To enable researchers to do their best research, PerkinElmer offers a product portfolio that delivers on robust reagents and dependable instruments to accelerate molecular biomarker and therapeutic discoveries.


On Target

Neurological Diseases - Key Facts and Figures

Alzheimer’s

Alzheimer’s Disease

  • Characterized by atrophy of the cerebral cortex, and certain sub-cortical regions
  • Affects 50 million people worldwide
  • Women are more at risk than men
Parkinson’s

Parkinson’s Disease

  • Long-term degenerative disorder with motor symptoms caused by dopaminergic neuronal death in the midbrain region
  • Affects 7 million to 10 million people worldwide
  • Men are more at risk than women
Multiple Scleorsis (MS)

Multiple Scleorsis (MS)

  • Brought about by irreversible axonal loss caused by the immune system’s attach on myelin sheaths that protect nerve fibers
  • Most common disabling neurological condition in young adults
  • Women are two to 3 times more affected than men
Amyotrophic Lateral Scelrosis (ALS)

Amyotrophic Lateral Scelrosis (ALS)

  • Characterized by loss of voluntary muscle control due to neuron death
  • Part of the motor neuron disease (MND) group
  • Also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease
Huntington’s Disease

Huntington’s Disease

  • A rare, inherited disease caused by a single gene defect that leads to progressive decline in movement, cognition, and mental/physical capability
  • Symptoms often appear in patients in their 30s or 40s
  • An autosomal dominant transmission with one defective copy
Spinal

Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA)

  • Hereditary autosomal recessive disease with progressive loss of motor neurons
  • Most common form associated with defects in both copies of SMN1
  • Affects approximately 1-2 per 100,000 persons, with incidence of around 1 in 10,000 live births.
Traumatic

Traumatic Brain and Spinal Cord Injury (TBI and SCI)

  • SCI is defined as damage to the spinal cord from trauma or from degeneration or disease
  • Research on global prevalence of SCI hovers between 236 to 1,298 per million people, with an increasing trend
  • TBI is a leading cause of death and disability in children and young adults in the US, with an estimated 1.5 million impacted annually
Batten

Batten’s Disease/ Neuronal Ceroid Lipofuscinoses

  • Broad class of rare but fatal inherited disorder caused by defective lysosome recycling mechanisms in the cell
  • Different forms /classification exists based on which CLN gene is causative of the disease
  • Estimates of 1 in 12,500 in some populations, with many more individuals living as carriers

Protein Aggregation

Several neurodegenerative disorders have been linked to excess or unnatural protein aggregations that are pathogenic due to their toxic nature. Among these are those proteins like prion, tau, β-amyloids, α-synucleins, and Huntington’s disease, whose de-regulation are associated with diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Huntington’s. More recently, the insolubility and lack of clearance of mutated FUS has been implicated in ALS/FTD as well.

It is thought that abnormal aggregations can result from misfolded proteins, mutations, excess generation of oligomer seeds, aberrant phosphorylation, and inefficient clearance, among other working theories. Several biotech and pharma companies are developing novel solutions targeting the aggregation or accumulation of these proteins as potential therapeutic targets, including the use of neutralizing antibodies or usage of PROTAC. Understanding the molecular pathways and resulting consequences of protein aggregation and accumulation is an active field of research.

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Neuroinflammation

Neuroinflammation – the CNS’ immune system activation in response to various damage cues – is thought to contribute to the cause and exacerbation of many neurological diseases, including several neurodegenerative diseases. Microglia cells, major regulators of the brain’s immune system that typical maintains brain homeostasis, along with astrocytes contribute to the neuroinflammatory processes involving NF-κβ activation and release of proinflammatory cytokines such as TNF- α and IL-6. Thus, under pathological conditions, neuroprotection and neurotoxicity induced by microglia activation is off-balance, and consequently astrocyte activity can also become de-regulated to perpetuate the pro-inflammatory response.

Researchers continue to strengthen the link between various tau pathologies and damage to neuronal pathways to the neuroinflammatory processes in the theory of neuroimmunomodulation, originally described by Dr. Maccioni’s group describing Alzheimer’s disease.

Though the brain is, for the most part, considered separate from the circumstances of rest of the body thanks to the blood-brain barrier, severe cytokine storms may also consequently affect brain function and cause brain swelling, along with cytokine-induced psychiatric symptoms, according to some studies. More recent studies have also linked neurological symptoms to COVID-19-induced cytokine storms as a result of chronic inflammation or local viral-induced brain inflammation.

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Altered Cellular Process

Several cellular processes that maintain the status quo in biological processes related to brain and nervous function can become disrupted in neurological disorders. These altered processes may include, and are not limited to, inappropriate apoptosis or stress-induced necrosis with cell cycle deregulation or arrest, diminished autophagy, impaired proteostatis and lipid peroxidation, lysosomal or mitochondrial dysfunction, abnormal cell-cell communication and intracellular signalling of key pathways involving G proteins or GPCR, and disrupted kinase/phosphatase function, among others.

Outside of specific alterations to core cellular pathways, some researchers are choosing to study and tackle more extensive effects in the form of epigenetic changes via DNA methylation and histone modifications in understanding certain neurodegenerative disorders. Similarly, others have taken a broader approach, looking at phenotypically observable features including impaired microglial motility, angiogenesis or endothelial or vascular dysfunction, to name a few.

To tackle the plethora of molecular and phenotypic pathways and that may be important to proper neuronal and brain function, PerkinElmer offers a fleet of reagents, consumables, and instruments spanning both in vitro assays to in vivo pre-clinical imaging to accelerate basic research, high-throughput screening, and high-content screening to ultimately help depict a clearer image of the dysregulation of critical cellular processes involved in neurological diseases.

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Rare Disease

Neurological disease research is not only limited to common neurodegenerative disorders that are complex and multifactorial in nature like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s. Rare diseases, classified as a condition affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US or no more than 1 person in 2,000 in the EU, include neurological and neuromuscular diseases such as ALS, DMD, Huntington’s, and SMA. Once thought to be synonymous to a ‘neglected’ disease, orphan diseases and their associated research has grown over the years thanks to increased support and social awareness from advocacy groups, several federal incentives such as orphan drug policies and cost of therapies for pharma.

This progress includes research and potential therapies that surround rare neurological disease as well, particularly those tied to a very defined genetic cause. One can no longer argue against the importance of neurogenetics and potential benefits of genetic testing/screening and corresponding gene therapies; similarly, the advances in technologies spearheaded by next-generation sequencing (NGS) and gene modification techniques utilizing CRISPR/Cas9 and other ingenious methods have propelled this new branch of therapeutics from nascent proof-of-concept innovations into an unstoppable force in many pharma research spheres.

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Biomarker and Drug Discovery

Large strides have been made in the field of neuroscience in recent decades, partly in attempts to pursue new therapies and drugs that may help cure various diseases; in reality, however, neurological disease drug discovery has been challenging, with small pipelines and several promising drugs failing to deliver visible results late in the investigation.

As more and more genetic and molecular pathways become elucidated in neurological disorders, in parallel, the importance of biomarkers for risk factor identification, pre-symptomatic disease detection, and likelihood of therapy response is actively explored. Another ambitious branch of drug discovery research is utilizing stem cells, which utilizes the principles of regenerative medicine, in the context of neurodegenerative diseases that is typically defined by neuronal cell or functional loss in one form or another.

Many current small molecule or biologic drug therapies address management of disease progression or symptoms as there are currently no cures or yet a comprehensive understanding of the be-all end-all cause of the disease. Outside of canonical drug discovery research, neural stem cell research is an attractive route of investigation for alternative therapy based on cellular replacement or neuroprotective niche enrichment.

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Explore Our Neuroscience Research Products and Solutions

高内涵筛选与分析

High-Content Analysis (HCA) or High-Content Screening (HCS) combines high-throughput automated imaging and analysis to extract quantitative multi-parametric dat ...

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多功能酶标仪

我们提供适合任何实验室各种应用需求的多模式微孔板读板仪。每一款读板仪都具有业内领先的检测技术,因此无论您选择任何一款仪器,您都可获得针对您应用的最佳检测性能。 VICTOR X 微孔板读板仪 市场上第一台多功能微孔板读板仪,VICTOR™ X 系列具有多种检测功能,性能可靠,为各种规模的实验室提供集灵活性、高速度和高性 ...

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Live-Cell Imaging

Live-cell imaging is the study of living cells using images acquired by time-lapse microscopy. It is becoming a requisite technique in many fields of life scien ...

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液体处理程序

利用我们简单易用的自动化液体处理解决方案加速您的生命科学研究:从工作台到诊所。 由基因组学、生物治疗学、高通量筛查、以及高含量分析领域大量经过验证的科学专业知识进行设计并作为支持,我们的各种可适应性液体处理平台和它们推动的科学研究一样具有动态性。我们的下一代测序自动化液体处理文库制备解决方案通过现今的测序技术消除了处理 ...

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Neuroscience Research Reagents

Over 55 million people worldwide are developing dementia and this number is expected to double by 2050. All the neurodegenerative disorders studies and associat ...

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Featured Solutions

激酶

Cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s research can benefit from the study of phosphorylation and protein kinase activity. Because of their role in signal transducti ...

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GPCR

G蛋白偶联受体(GPCR)是结构变化多样的一大类蛋白膜受体,包括:β1和β2肾上腺素能受体、多巴胺能受体和胆碱能受体。我们可提供G蛋白偶联受体研究所需的所有先进检测分析设备。 以及多种靶标Gs-、Gq-和Gi-偶联受体的实验试剂。 我们产品还包括: 荧光、发光或吸收光检测所需的可调焦GPCR细胞成像仪和液体工作站; 经 ...

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多功能酶标仪

我们提供适合任何实验室各种应用需求的多模式微孔板读板仪。每一款读板仪都具有业内领先的检测技术,因此无论您选择任何一款仪器,您都可获得针对您应用的最佳检测性能。 VICTOR X 微孔板读板仪 市场上第一台多功能微孔板读板仪,VICTOR™ X 系列具有多种检测功能,性能可靠,为各种规模的实验室提供集灵活性、高速度和高性 ...

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高内涵筛选与分析

High-Content Analysis (HCA) or High-Content Screening (HCS) combines high-throughput automated imaging and analysis to extract quantitative multi-parametric dat ...

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