What if the key to defeating Parkinson’s lies hidden inside a single type of brain cell—and only supercomputers are powerful enough to find it?
More than one million Americans struggle daily with tremors, slowed movement, and speech changes brought on by Parkinson’s disease—a progressive neurological disorder that currently has no cure, according to data from the Parkinson’s Foundation and the Mayo Clinic. The toll goes beyond physical symptoms: it drains families emotionally and financially. Just in California, the economic cost of Parkinson’s exceeds six billion dollars in healthcare bills and lost productivity every year.
For decades, scientists have been trying to decode the underlying brain activity responsible for the disease’s signature symptoms. One of the biggest mysteries has centered around an unusual surge of electrical activity known as beta waves—tiny rhythmic pulses around 15 Hertz that ripple through areas of the brain controlling movement. What sparks these abnormal waves has long puzzled researchers. But thanks to massive computational power from the U.S. National Science Foundation’s ACCESS program, scientists may finally have an answer.
A team of researchers from the Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP) Collaborative Research Network used supercomputing allocations on Expanse—the high-performance system housed at UC San Diego’s San Diego Supercomputer Center, part of the university’s new School of Computing, Information, and Data Sciences—to run brain simulations on an unprecedented scale. Their mission: to model how certain brain cells malfunction in people with Parkinson’s, potentially paving the way toward treatments that target those exact weaknesses instead of broadly addressing symptoms.
Donald W. Doherty, a research scientist at the State University of New York (SUNY) Downstate Medical Center and a member of the ASAP network, explained how Expanse’s computing power made these breakthroughs possible. “We built a detailed digital replica of Parkinson’s brain activity by feeding data from rodent models into complex simulations powered by Expanse,” Doherty said. “The results showed that reduced activity in PT5B neurons—specialized cells in the brain’s primary motor cortex—throws off the balance of signals across the entire motor control network.”
That discovery stunned neurobiologists. Even a slight dysfunction in these PT5B neurons caused major spikes in beta wave activity, suggesting that the health of this specific neuron type plays an outsized role in maintaining smooth movement. “What’s amazing,” Doherty added, “is that when these neurons stop firing properly, they create a bottleneck that affects motor function throughout the brain.”
Here’s where the research gets controversial. Most current Parkinson’s treatments focus on boosting dopamine levels or stimulating large brain areas to ease symptoms. But the new findings point to a far more precise—and potentially revolutionary—approach: directly targeting the health and function of PT5B neurons themselves. If these neurons are the epicenter of the problem, then treatments designed to restore or protect them could go beyond symptom relief and actually address the root cause.
“Knowing that PT5B neurons are both central to movement and compromised by Parkinson’s gives us a clear cellular target,” Doherty said. “That insight could shift future therapies from managing symptoms toward reversing the disease’s core mechanisms.”
The team’s study, published in Nature (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41531-025-01070-4), offers new hope that such neuron-focused therapies could one day restore natural movement and independence to people living with Parkinson’s. The next step for the ASAP network is to bridge this research to real-world clinical applications—creating treatments that stabilize or replace failing neurons. If successful, this strategy could permanently change how Parkinson’s is treated, improving quality of life for millions around the globe.
This groundbreaking computational research was made possible by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s ACCESS program (allocation no. IBM140002), which provided the high-performance computing resources used on the Expanse system.
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Do you think focusing on one type of neuron could finally lead to a cure, or is Parkinson’s too complex to solve through a single biological target? Let’s discuss in the comments—your thoughts could inspire the next breakthrough.
