PatientsLikeMe, the first community-based personalized medicine platform for people with life-changing conditions, and 23andMe, the world’s leading personal genomics company, announce a partnership today to help people with Parkinson’s disease.  PatientsLikeMe is teaming with 23andMe on its effort to recruit 10,000 people with Parkinson’s for a massive study of the disease, and give patients a way to learn more about their personal genetics.

“Today, technology is moving faster than the research establishment,” says James Heywood, co-founder and chairman of PatientsLikeMe.  “We are excited to see what happens when you give patients the ability to see variations of their disease and compare it to their own, while enabling them to easily define their personal genomics.”

As part of the project, PatientsLikeMe will be adding its genetics phenotyping tools currently available in its ALS community to the Parkinson’s community in July.  Patients will be able to manually enter their Parkinson’s genetic mutation while having the ability to search for others who share the same mutation.  The new features will help PatientsLikeMe researchers use new data to evaluate the effects of genetics on variation in the Parkinson’s population.

“PatientsLikeMe has done an extraordinary job of giving people with Parkinson’s the opportunity to learn about their disease by connecting with other Parkinson’s patients,” says 23andMe co-founder, Linda Avey.  “’This partnership will go a long way to advancing the goal of the 23andMe Parkinson’s study, which is to find genetic and environmental modifiers to PD, its symptoms and progression, as well as the effectiveness of different treatments.”

Heywood and Avey will both be speaking at the inaugural Consumer Genetics Conference this week in Boston.