 Very grateful to be here tonight and some of you might know there's five to ten million people in the world today who are fighting Parkinson's disease. In fact it's becoming so common that I'm pretty sure some of you here tonight you know will know someone who is living with this disease. A few years ago my grandmother started complaining about pain you know left arm stiffness. She went to the doctor and at 59 years old she was diagnosed with Parkinson's. We know that the movement symptoms in Parkinson's are due to the loss of dopamine cells in the midbrain in a place called substantial nigra and the best drug against Parkinson's today is basically compensating for the low level of dopamine in the brain. Now it helps a lot, it helps my grandmother and many people but the problem is it doesn't stop the progression of the disease. What it means is that my grandmother cannot win a fight against Parkinson's. For her every day every day is harder than the previous one. She now describes herself as a hyperactive mind locked in a sluggish body. She has trouble focusing. She loses her balance. She sleeps like four or five hours a night and she is relentless all day to compensate for her slowness and keep her life seemingly normal to others. So the goal of my group is to find a better weapon for my grandmother and millions of others to win the fight against this disease. We really desperately need a better you know like at least something that can slow down the progression of the disease. So how do we get there? Well first we must understand why those dopamine cells are degenerating so fast in Parkinson's patients and you know like most brain disorders Parkinson's is a complex disease. Each patient is unique in a sense that they the difference you know like the causes might be a combination of different genetic predisposition, lifestyle, maybe it's a chemico, it's very exposed to, and aging. And the initial cause of the disease might be different from my grandmother and someone else but I believe we might be a point of convergence at the cellular level where something happened before the loss of dopamine and a girl in this project is to find that molecular signature that is common to most Parkinson's patients. So again how do we find that molecular target? Well so most previous work until recently have been focusing on animal model, mouse model, and post-modern brain tissue, human brain tissue. Now these models are extremely valuable and they're great but they have significant shortcomings and so for example mice just naturally don't get Parkinson's at least as far as I know. And the post-modern human brain tissue by the time we get there you get them they so damaged that it's not really clear what you can get out of them. So in this project we're trying to take a new scientific strategy in which we will study live human urine derived from the patients themselves. We're building upon a new technology that we had in previous talk that consists in reprogramming skin cells into stem cells and stem cells into brain cells. So basically we start with a small skin biopsy and it leaves no trace, no scar, so you can obtain it from a patient or from a healthy subject. And then we generate live human neurons that we can study extensively in the laboratory setting and the idea is pretty simple. You compare brain tissue from a patient from a healthy subject, you find differences and then you try to screen compounds to correct those differences. So finally the hope is that the new drug we might discover with these methods that will work on the patient cells in the lab have a much higher chance to succeed later on in clinical trials. So with that I would like to thank the brain foundation, thank the donors for their generous support. It really makes a difference and I'm excited to go back to the lab and hopefully come back with some exciting results. Thank you.