OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Huntington’s disease (HD) is a devastating autosomal dominantly inherited neurodegenerative disease for which there is currently no effective disease modifying therapy. The genetic predictability of HD provides an opportunity for early therapeutic intervention many years before overt symptom onset and at a time when reversal or prevention of neural dysfunction may still be possible. As HD is monogenetic, fully penetrant, and characterised by a long premanifest phase, it is emerging as a potential model for studying therapeutic intervention in other neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease where no preclinical diagnostic tests exist. Understanding of HD pathogenesis is evolving, and there are a number of candidate therapeutics with potential disease-modifying effects that are currently being tested. In my talk, I will update on insights into HD pathogenesis, new data to understand the neurobiology of the preclinical phase of neurodegeneration and neural compensation and plasticity in HD, and give an overview on exciting advances working towards HD gene silencing in humans.