"Neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease (PD) and Huntington’s disease (HD) still lack treatments that are disease modifying. The proposed network is going to address the three most important bottlenecks for finding more effective medicine in brain disorders. Those are: (i) identification and validation of pre-symptomatic and surrogate marker for disease progression, (ii) Development of model systems that translate to human pathology and are predictive of clinical efficacy, and (iii) better understanding of disease mechanisms leading to better target selection. We believe that a joint effort putting together industry and academia offers a great opportunity to cope with those bottlenecks. Therefore, we have assembled a unique consortium to which industry (5 partners) and academia (5 partners) contribute equally. Through putting together these partners into one network Neuromodel is going to achieve both organization of an excellent training program and performance of excellent research projects with a pronounced focus on intersectional transfer of knowledge. The gain for individual early stage researchers as well as for the participating research teams is obvious. On the one hand, the career chances of young researchers will improve enormously by receiving high quality training (for and by research) in areas of high demand on the employment market. On the other hand, the intersectional, interconnected and integrated research effort pursued by Neuromodel will definitively contribute towards finding more effective treatments in PD and HD. Expertise available within the consortium has lead to the definition of four structural elements – (i) understanding disease mechanisms leading to target identification, (ii) approaches towards treatment, (iii) development of models predictive for efficacy and translating to human pathology, (iv) behavioural markers of animal models - that determines the training as well as the research program."