Leaders in Research
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| Michael A Schwarzschild, M.D., Ph.D. Associate Professor of Neurology Massachusetts General Hospital Harvard Medical School
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| Primary Research (for Beeson Program): Sorting out clues to Parkinson's disease: Caffeine, Postmenopausal estrogen and addiction.
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After obtaining his undergraduate training in biochemistry at Princeton University, Michael Schwarzschild went on to medical and graduate neuroscience training at Harvard Medical School. There he pursued his PhD thesis with Dr. Richard Zigmond on the neurochemistry of tyrosine hydroxylase, the enzyme controlling dopamine biosynthesis. He undertook neurology residency and then Parkinson's disease fellowship training at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) under the guidance of Drs. Anne Young and John Growdon. During a postdoctoral research fellowship with Dr. Steve Hyman in the mid-90s, he developed expertise in gene regulation and cell death pathways in the dopamine-rich brain region most affected in Parkinson's disease.
Since 1996 Dr. Schwarzschild has directed the Molecular Neurobiology Laboratory at MGH, focusing on the role of 3 purines — adenosine, caffeine and urate — in animal models of Parkinson’s disease. Together with Dr. Jiang-Fan Chen he discovered the neuroprotective properties of adenosine A2A receptor blockers (including caffeine) in mouse models of the disease. His research team then provided evidence that these drugs may help prevent the side effects of standard antiparkinsonian therapy known as dyskinesias. His leadership of a series of international research conferences on A2A receptors in Parkinson’s (www.A2APD.org) has also helped translate our understanding of this drug target into an exciting new therapy for Parkinson’s patients.
Most recently, through a fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration with epidemiologist Dr. Alberto Ascherio of the Harvard School of Public Health, Dr. Schwarzschild and his colleagues have discovered an unprecedented clue to why disease progression is mild in some and aggressive in others. In partnership with the Parkinson Study Group (PSG) they showed that the purine antioxidant urate can serve as a predictor of not only the risk of PD, but also the rate at which it progresses. Their work identifies urate as a molecular biomarker of Parkinson’s disease progression rate, and as a candidate neuroprotective agent as well.
Dr. Schwarzschild has been the recipient of a George C. Cotzias Fellowship from the American Parkinson's Disease Association and a Paul Beeson Physician Faculty Scholar Award for Aging Research. Since 1997 he has been an active clinical investigator in disease progression trials of the PSG. He is currently an Associate Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and a staff physician on the Neurology Service at MGH where he works with Parkinson's patients and their families in his weekly movement disorders clinic.