The 2021 Bettencourt Prize for Young Researchers was awarded to Stéphane Prange, post-doctoral fellow in neuroscience, for his work on Parkinson’s disease.

Symptoms and variability of Parkinson's disease

Parkinson's disease is the second most common neurodegenerative disease in France. It gradually destroys a very specific group of neurons, the dopaminergic neurons, in a part of the brain called substantia nigra (SN). Dopaminergic neurons belong to a network that controls movement, which explains why the most common symptoms are slow movement (bradykinesia), stiffness and tremors.

In addition to these motor symptoms, patients may experience equally debilitating symptoms such as sleep disorders, pain, hallucinations, cognitive impairment, depression and anxiety. The symptoms and progression of Parkinson's disease vary greatly from patient to patient.

Stéphane Prange is interested in the mechanisms that explain this variability in patients. He will continue to explore them in Thilo van Eimeren’s laboratory at the University of Cologne.

Does physical activity boost resilience?

During his post-doctoral fellowship in Cologne, Dr. Prange will determine what changes in the brain help offset the loss of SN dopaminergic neurons before the onset of motor symptoms in Parkinson’s disease.

He will try to determine whether the patient's pre-diagnosis physical activity contributes to resilience, explore the relationships between loss of function of dopaminergic neurons in the SN and motor symptoms, and compare neural networks in patients before and after the onset of motor symptoms.

The study will contribute to knowledge of the factors that determine when symptoms appear and brain differences between individuals in order to understand the disease and treat it earlier.

Stéphane Prange in a few words

Stéphane Prange is a neurology intern at the Pierre Wertheimer Hospital in Lyon. He did his PhD under the direction of Stéphane Thobois at the Marc Jeannerod Institute of Cognitive Sciences (Bron, France). During this period, Dr. Prange studied the mechanisms underlying the heterogeneity of symptoms (motor and non-motor) and prognosis of patients with Parkinson's disease.

His post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Cologne will allow him to acquire new skills in structural and functional imaging and establish collaborations for the study of the disease. In particular, the use of very high field magnetic resonance imaging will allow him to go further in understanding the differences between patients that make them more or less resilient to the onset of Parkinson's disease symptoms.

Bettencourt Prize for Young Researchers

Created in 1990, the Bettencourt Prize for Young Researchers is one of the first initiatives of the Fondation Bettencourt Schueller. Until 2021, this prize was awarded each year to 14 young doctors of science or doctors of medicine, to enable them to carry out their post-doctoral stay in the best foreign laboratories. 349 young researchers were distinguished. The prize endowment was €25,000.

All the award-winners