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Abstract

Although animal models of Parkinson’s disease (PD) involving non-human primates, rodents, dogs, cats and goldfish are
still the main approaches used in medical research, there is currently no available animal model that accurately reproduces
the human disease. Whereas a range of symptoms might be understood, the causes of human illnesses and their progression
are often impossible to identify in animals since the only human models available are post-mortem samples from PD patients.
The initiation and progression of the disease in human still remain to be fully characterized. Therefore, there is an imperative
need to go back to basics to investigate and understand the mechanism of the events happening prior to the dopaminergic
cell death. To this aim, a human dopaminergic cell model was developed from a human neural progenitor ReNcells and to
which a neurotoxin 6OHDA was applied to mimic ofthe different stages of human Parkinsonian dopaminergic cell.The aim of
this study was to investigate the initiation and progression of the PD at the cellular level while monitoring the production of
dopamine. This presentation includes the preliminaryresults of this study which validate our human cellular PD model and the
effects of potential inhibitors of the loss of dopamine.

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