Speaker Profile
Jeffrey H. Kordower

Jeffrey H. Kordower PhD

Neurosurgery, Neuroscience
Chicago, Illinois, United States of America

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Jeffrey H. Kordower, Ph.D., is the Jean Schweppe-Armour Professor of Neurological Sciences, professor of Neurosurgery, director of the Research Center for Brain Repair, section head of Neuroscience, and director of the Neuroscience graduate program. He is an international authority in the area of movement disorders, with special expertise in experimental therapeutics and pathogenesis in movement disorders. His laboratory is particularly well known for studies in primates. He has performed the critical preclinical studies required to translate experimental therapeutics into clinical trials. Numerous gene and cell therapy preclinical studies conducted in his laboratory have progressed to being tested in patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) at Rush University Medical Center and at other international research centers.

Dr. Kordower has published landmark papers in the area of cell replacement strategies, including the first demonstration that fetal dopaminergic grafts can survive, innervate and form synapses in patients with PD, which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. He also demonstrated that long-term grafts in such patients can form Lewy bodies in a study published in Nature Medicine. He recently co-authored a paper in Nature demonstrating that human dopaminergic stem cells can survive and function in parkinsonian mice, rats, and monkeys. He published the lead article in Science demonstrating that gene delivery of glial-derived neurotrophic factors (GDNF) can prevent the emergence of motor symptoms and prevents nigrostriatal degeneration in nonhuman primate models of PD. He was also the first to demonstrate that gene delivery of ciliary neurotrophic factors can remove neurodegenerative processes in a nonhuman primate model of Huntington’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease.
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