‘It’s going to come quicker than we think’: Parkinson’s advocate shares hope for treatment as Allen Institute launches AI-powered initiative

When Lisa Volenec was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2014, she struggled to accept a future shaped by a progressive neurological disorder with no cure.

“Imagine getting into your car every day, and the engine light is on, and you have no idea what’s happening and how you’re going to deal with it,” Volenec, who experiences a different challenge almost daily, told KIRO Newsradio. “Tremors, some of the freezing gait when you’re walking. But I had deep brain stimulation surgery two years ago, so that has been a game changer for me.”

Today, she channels that diagnosis into advocacy through the nonprofit This Is Parkinson’s and is placing new hope in a global research effort led by Seattle’s Allen Institute that aims to transform how scientists understand and treat brain diseases.

The institute has launched the Brain Health Accelerator, an international collaboration involving about 30 research organizations that will use artificial intelligence, human brain tissue and advanced cellular mapping to better understand diseases including Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s disease, ALS, Huntington’s disease and Lewy body dementia.

“This initiative is really about putting human brain front and center to take advantage of new technologies to get the best, deepest understanding of the human brain across the course of disease and drive that knowledge towards developing new therapeutics based on targeting the vulnerable and affected cell populations in the brain,” Brain Health Vice President, Dr. Ed Lein, explained. “It’s really given us a deep understanding of precisely what happens to the brain over the course of disease, and that knowledge is really essential for understanding the progression of disease, new targets for disease, and new therapeutic avenues for treating disease.”

Researchers take new approach to Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s by mapping individual brain cells with AI

More than 57 million people worldwide live with neurodegenerative diseases, yet effective treatments remain elusive because scientists have struggled to fully understand the complexity of the human brain.

Rather than focusing primarily on the proteins and molecules associated with disease, researchers will study the brain’s individual cells and the neural circuits they form to identify exactly which cells become vulnerable as disease progresses.

Scientists said advances in AI, large-scale brain mapping and global scientific collaboration now make that work possible at a scale that wasn’t achievable just a few years ago.

Researchers will analyze donated human brain tissue to build detailed maps of healthy and diseased brains, with the goal of identifying new targets for precision therapies that could protect or restore damaged cells.

For Volenec, who now lives with Parkinson’s every day, the initiative represents more than scientific progress. It offers hope that future patients may have treatment options that didn’t exist when she was diagnosed.

“I don’t think the answer is going to be found by one person in one lab, so my hope is that this collaborative effort finds the answers that I think we’re so close to, and I can’t believe that the Allen Institute is doing this and bringing such incredible partners together to say again that we’re going to figure this out,” Volenec said. “I think we’re like this close, and I don’t think it’s going to take decades and decades of lab research to figure this out. I think it’s going to come quicker than we think.”

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