Over the last 25 years our understanding of Parkinson’s disease (PD) has changed dramatically. This includes better understanding different types of disease and their basis including genetic variants responsible for some of these differences. In addition, our ability to better study diseases in the lab has been transformed by this information and the capacity to make nerve cells using the patient’s own cells through so called iPSC technologies and an array of tools to study in great detail pathology within individual cells. Linked to all this has been a deeper understanding of what might be driving the disease itself, including the idea that the protein that lies at the heart of the disease (alpha synuclein) may spread from cell to cell seeding pathology as it does so, which in turn has led to a whole swathe of alpha synuclein immunisation trials. In this talk Professor Barker draws these different strands together to discuss how all this work impacts on our understanding of PD today and the treatments of tomorrow.