Ten years ago, Congress created the Morris K. Udall Centers of Excellence for Parkinson's Disease Research (Udall Centers).  The primary goal of the Udall Centers Program is to develop new clinical treatments for Parkinson's disease.  However, it is well recognized that because there is so much that we do not yet understand about the causes of Parkinson’s disease, it is understood that basic science is currently a key component of the overall effort to develop clinical treatments.  One of the goals of the Udall Center program is to have an infrastructure in place that can efficiently facilitate a rapid translational process when promising breakthroughs occur.

Because the Udall Centers are such an important part of the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Parkinson’s disease research portfolio, and such an important part of PAN’s advocacy work, we have asked all Udall Center Directors to provide PAN with lay language descriptions of their research and how this research might lead to better treatments and a cure for Parkinson’s.

The Udall Centers are publicly funded by the National Institutes of Health but they are, by no means, all of the NIH-funded Parkinson’s disease research.  In fact, currently the NIH spends an estimated $205 million on Parkinson’s disease research.