Why one Parkinson’s treatment may not work for every patient
Published on 07/05/2026 - 7:00 GMT+2 Parkinson’s disease may not be one disease, but several biologically distinct conditions that could require different treatments, a new...
Published on 07/05/2026 - 7:00 GMT+2
Parkinson’s disease may not be one disease, but several biologically distinct conditions that could require different treatments, a new study suggests.
Researchers at Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie (VIB) and KU Leuven in Belgium used machine learning to identify two main groups and five subgroups of Parkinson’s disease in fruit fly models.
Parkinson’s disease, which involves symptoms such as movement difficulties and progressive neurological decline, is often treated as one disorder.
But the disease can be caused by mutations in many different genes, each of which may disrupt the brain in different ways.
That has made it difficult to develop effective therapies. A drug designed to target one biological pathway may help some patients, but have little effect in others.
According to the World Health Organization, death and disability due to Parkinson’s disease are rapidly increasing. In 2019, the organisation estimated over 8.5 million individuals to have the disorder.
“When clinicians or patients are looking at the disease, they see the clinical symptoms, which unifies people with Parkinson's disease,” said Patrik Verstreken, head of the research group of molecular neurobiology at VIB-KU Leuven.
“But when you look under the hood at the molecular level, then you see that they fall into subcategories. And that's important because one drug to target the different molecular dysfunctions in all Parkinson's disease essentially doesn't exist,” Verstreken added.
To study those differences, researchers used fruit flies carrying mutations in 24 genes linked to Parkinson’s disease. They watched how the flies behaved over time and then used computer analysis to find patterns in the results.
“We came in without any preconceived notions of how a specific mutation would affect our animal model. We took animals with mutations in any of those 24 different genes that are causing the disease, and we just monitored their behaviour over periods of time,” said Natalie Kaempf, first author of the study and a researcher at VIB-KU Leuven Center for Brain & Disease Research.
The results suggest that different genetic forms of Parkinson’s naturally fall into separate groups. That could help scientists search for warning signs specific to each group and develop treatments aimed at the patients most likely to benefit.
“By having these subcategories, we can now go and look within that group of patients with those particular mutations, search specific biomarkers, and develop drugs tailored to each group,” said Verstreken.
Researchers also tested possible treatments in the different groups of fruit fly models. They found that a treatment that improved Parkinson’s-like symptoms in one group did not necessarily work in another.
“When we took a first compound that cured subgroup A and tested it in subgroup B, the latter wasn’t rescued. Our study shows that you can make subgroup-specific drugs that have positive effects and are really specific to that subgroup,” said Verstreken.
The research is still at an early stage and was carried out in fruit flies, not in human patients.
But it points towards a future in which Parkinson’s treatments could be matched more closely to the biological cause of a person’s disease.
The team says the same approach could also be useful for other complex diseases caused by many different genes or environmental factors.
“The same principle can be applied to other types of diseases. Diseases that are caused by mutations in a variety of different genes or environmental factors could be classified according to this principle,” said Verstreken.
