PDF Scientific Director Receives Top Parkinson's Research Award

Stanley Fahn, M.D., Scientific Director of the Parkinson's Disease Foundation and Director of the Center for Parkinson's Disease and Other Movement Disorders at Columbia University, has been chosen by the Annemarie Opprecht Foundation to receive its prestigious Parkinson Award for 2005. The award is given every three years to the authors of the two most outstanding papers published in Parkinson's disease research, chosen by the foundation's prize committee.

Dr. Fahn will receive the award for his paper on the ELLDOPA project, a study that discovered that levodopa - the gold-standard treatment for Parkinson's for more than three decades - does not hasten the clinical progression of the disease, as some scientists had feared, and may actually slow it down. The paper was published in The New England Journal of Medicine in December 2004.

The Annemarie Opprecht Foundation was established in 1998 in Switzerland by a philanthropist of the same name. Its mission is to promote medical or medical related research in the field of Parkinson's disease on an international level. The prize committee that chooses the award winners is composed of highly-regarded and well-known Parkinson's scientists from around the world.

Dr. Fahn will share the award with Dr. Zbigniew Wszolek, of the Mayo Clinic Jacksonville in Florida, who published his work on genetics and parkinsonism, focusing on mutations in the LRRK2 gene. Both doctors will receive their awards at a ceremony in St. Gallen, Switzerland on October 28. PDF congratulates Dr. Fahn on this high and well-deserved honor.