Mission and Vision

The mission of the UAB Center for Neurodegeneration and Experimental Therapeutics (CNET) is to promote the discovery of novel treatments for neurodegenerative disorders, to teach scientists and clinicians about these diseases, and to facilitate the application of these discoveries to clinical care of patients.

The neurodegenerative disorders include Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson disease, Huntington disease, and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS, known as Lou Gehrig’s disease). These are frequent and disabling diseases. A common feature of these diseases is that in each there is selective premature death and malfunction of neurons in specific parts of the brain, which gives rise to the characteristic symptoms. At present there are treatments which can provide some temporary improvement of the symptoms of these diseases, but there are no treatments which can substantially slow the underlying brain degeneration.

Recent discoveries have provided important clues to the causes of neurodegenerative disorders, and have revealed that these diseases, which are distinct in their symptoms, in fact share many common mechanisms. The primary goal of UAB CNET is to accelerate the translational process, and move basic scientific discoveries from the laboratory to clinical use as rapidly and safely as possible, through an integrated, multi-disciplinary approach involving basic scientists, clinical scientists and a variety of supporting disciplines.