Neurodegenerative disease: models, mechanisms, and a new hope

Neurodegeneration is a feature of many debilitating, incurable diseases that are rapidly rising in prevalence, such as Parkinson's disease. There is an urgent need to develop new and more effective therapeutic strategies to combat these devastating diseases. Models - from cell-based systems, to unicellular organisms, to complex animals - have proven to be a useful tool to help the research community shed light on the mechanisms underlying neurodegenerative diseases, and these advances have now begun to provide promising therapeutic avenues. In this themed issue of Disease Models & Mechanisms, a special collection of articles focused on neurodegenerative diseases is introduced. The collection includes original…