Vikram Khurana
Co-PI (Core Leadership)
Harvard University
Vikram (Vik) Khurana, MD PhD, is a physician-scientist and chief of the Division of Movement Disorders at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Khurana and colleagues have advanced our understanding of the cellular consequences of alpha-synuclein-misfolding, the fundamental pathology associated with Parkinson’s and related diseases. They have identified and reversed alpha-synuclein pathologies in Parkinson’s patient stem cells, molecularly defined the relationship between these pathologies and genetic risk factors for the disease, and advanced therapies targeting alpha-synuclein to clinical trials. Dr. Khurana’s translational goal is to bring genomic and stem-cell technologies toward personalized diagnostics and therapeutics for Parkinson’s and related disorders. He is a former Fulbright Scholar, a George C. Cotzias Fellow of the American Parkinson’s Disease Association, and a New York Stem Cell Foundation Robertson Stem Cell Investigator. In 2020 his team was declared a grant recipient in The Michael J. Fox Foundation’s Ken Griffin Alpha-Synuclein Imaging Competition.
Recent ASAP Preprints & Published Papers
Cholesterol-mediated Lysosomal Dysfunction in APOE4 Astrocytes Promotes α-Synuclein Pathology in Human Brain Tissue
Rapid iPSC inclusionopathy models shed light on formation, consequence, and molecular subtype of α-synuclein inclusions
