Research Frontiers
Chapter 2, Part 2

What´s special to Dr. Cattaneo about HD research?

HD research involves a great deal of obligation to the HD community and this obligation is what drives Dr. Cattaneo and her coworkers to produce promising results in the lab. The lab often receives not only phone calls but also visits from individuals and families affected by HD, who bring assortments of jams and cookies and cakes to show their gratitude for the researchers´ work. Dr. Cattaneo and the other members of the lab recognize that it is important for the patients and their families to know that someone is constantly working on uncovering the mysteries of HD. For this exact reason, Cattaneo and some of the other researchers occasionally present their scientific results, in non-technical terms at the meetings of Italian associations for people with HD. This constant interaction between the researchers and individuals affected by HD has such a positive effect on the lab that the researchers become not only "driven by curiosity, but also by the desire to help patients." All the researchers in the lab confess that they feel increased pressure to produce and publish results because they know that they are working for real patients - and this "healthy pressure," as Dr. Cattaneo calls it, is one of the factors that make HD research so special.

Dr. Cattaneo also believes that HD research is extraordinary because of the close-knit HD research community that continues to develop around the world. Funding and support from associations such as the Hereditary Disease Foundation and the Huntington´s Disease Society of America (HDSA) in the United States and others in the European Union help bring together researchers who share one goal - to find a cure for HD - so that they can work as a team rather than compete with each other for results. Since 1997, the HDSA has coordinated "Coalition for the Cure," which organizes researchers from almost twenty different laboratories and organizes them into five teams that work on different aspects of HD. Cattaneo says that coalitions such as these not only promote but also require sharing of unpublished results among research labs, which helps the coalition as a whole make progress as researchers build on each other´s ideas. Furthermore, labs that are part of such alliances have the advantage of sharing research materials such as useful genes or experimental mouse strains (for more information on animal models in HD research, click here), which speeds up the research, keeps costs down, and makes possible experiments that might not otherwise be possible. This type of sharing helps research labs circumvent financial and legal obstacles that might prevent them from obtaining materials developed by other research institutions.

On the one hand, being part of a scientific community that emphasizes sharing goes a long way to reduce competitive barriers commonly seen between labs working on similar projects. On the other hand, Cattaneo says it also adds pressure to be constantly productive. Researchers are expected to present new results at each of the annual or biannual meetings they must attend for each coalition or organization. Cattaneo admits that such expectations can add stress to her life, but being part of a community of researchers who have placed complete trust in each other and have vowed to work together for families affected by HD makes it worthwhile. She emphasizes that the formation of such a close-knit community could only have been possible with a disease like HD, because there has been historically much less interest in HD research than in diseases such as Alzheimer´s or Parkinson´s. (For more information on these diseases and how they compare to HD, click here.) Through her work on HD, Dr. Cattaneo has forged strong relationships with researchers from across the globe, including Drs. James Gusella and Marcy MacDonald at Massachusetts General Hospital, whom two other HOPES members visited in the summer of 2004. (For more information about the latter, click here.) In the process, Cattaneo´s obligation to patients has been complemented by the obligation she now feels to produce valuable results that she can share with fellow researchers.

Last Modified: 04/12/2007

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