Other Appointments:
Director, Section of Neurobiology

Overview:
Kordower is an international authority in the area of movement disorders with special expertise in pathophysiology and experimental therapeutic strategies in Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and Huntington’s disease — especially using nonhuman primate models. He has published landmark papers in the area of cell replacement strategies, including the first demonstration that fetal dopaminergic grafts can survive, innervate and form synapses in patients with Parkinson’s disease that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. His recent demonstration that long-term grafts in such patients can form Lewy bodies was recently published in Nature Medicine.

Kordower has published seminal studies including the lead article in Science demonstrating that gene delivery of the trophic factors GDNF and neurturin can prevent the emergence of motor symptoms and nigrostriatal degeneration in a monkey model of PD. He also was the first to demonstrate that gene delivery of trophic factors can obviate neurodegenerative processes in nonhuman primate models of Huntington’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease, with these studies being published in Nature and The Journal of Comparative Neurology, respectively.

He has published numerous papers investigating the role of misfolded proteins in PD pathogenesis. These include papers in human and experimental PD on the role of alpha synuclein misfolding on Nurr1 and dopamine expression, lysosome and proteasome dysfunction, and axonal transport defects. He is a co-author on the landmark Nature paper lead by the Studer group demonstrating the structural and functional efficacy of dopaminergic human stem cells in rodent and nonhuman primate models of PD. In addition, he is collaborating with Trojanowski and Lee and recently demonstrated the ability of preformed fibrils to be transported in nonhuman primates and cause degeneration in nonhuman primates, a study that serves as the foundation of the current application.

Kordower has published over 350 papers, has lectured all over the world, has been on over 20 editorial boards, and is on the SAB’s of many biotech companies and scientific organizations. He is a past councilor and past president of the American Society for Neural Transplantation, past chair for the Committee for the Use of Animals for SFN, and is a founding SAB member for the Michael J. Fox Foundation and is a past member of their Executive SAB.

My Scopus ID is 7005337450.
My NIH COMMONS name is JKORDOWER.

Education
PhD, Queens College, City University of New York
MA, Queens College, City University of New York
BA, Queens College, City University of New York