Todd Levine, MD: Synuclein’s Role in Parkinson Disease Diagnosis

“We actually still, to this day, don’t understand the function of synuclein, but we know that we need it in order for our neurons to survive and behave normally.”

In late 2020, Cutaneous NeuroDiagnostics (CND) Life Sciences was granted $2.4 million from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for phase 2 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR). The company is using this money to conduct an extensive study investigating and improving its Syn-One test, a tool that facilitates the detection and diagnosis of synucleinopathies such as Parkinson disease (PD).

The Syn-One test detects folded, phosphorylated alpha-synuclein (aSyn), a common biomarker of these diseases, in the dermis to help physicians differentiate between and diagnose different synucleinopathies that often present similarly. Todd Levine, MD, chief medical officer, CND Life Sciences; and medical director, Honor Health Neurology, recently spoke with NeurologyLive to discuss this test and the attained funding.

In that interview, Levine provided some background on how the research into this effort has gotten to this point, including the current understanding of aSyn’s role in these disease processes. He also offered an in-depth explanation of how the test works to identify these misfolded proteins.