(Note: Whitehead also used them for Sickle Cell
http://www.wi.
Stem cell therapy in rats improves Parkinson's: study
CHICAGO (Thomson Financial) - A novel and untested stem cell therapy
has significantly improved the symptoms of Parkinson's disease in
rats, according to a study released Monday.
Researchers at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, used a relatively new technique to re-
engineer stem cells from skin cells and then treat rats with the
debilitating neurological disease.
When the rats were tested weeks after the cell transplant, their
Parkinson's symptoms were significantly reduced, confirming that
these substitutes for embryonic stem cells, so-called reprogrammed
stem cells, can replace lost or damaged neurons.
'This is the first demonstration that reprogrammed cells can
integrate into the neural system or positively affect
neurodegenerative disease,' said lead author Marius Wernig of the
study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Stem cell therapy has been touted as a promising intervention for
neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's or Alzheimer's,
because these so-called master cells have the ability to change into
many of the hundreds of different cell types in the body, replacing
ones lost or damaged by disease.
But the use of embryonic stem cells has been mired in controversy
amid ethical objections to harvesting them from discarded fetuses.
In late 2007, US and Japanese researchers announced they had devised
methods to reprogram human skin cells to give them stem cell
properties, potentially side-stepping the controversy that has
hamstrung the field.
The experiments by the Whitehead Institute researchers provide the
first evidence in animals that these reprogrammed cells act as they
are supposed to.
Wernig and his colleagues took skin cells from adult mice and induced
pluripotent stem cells (IPS cells) by using retroviruses to activate
genes that turned them into stem cells.
The IPS cells were then differentiated into neural precursor cells
and dopamine neurons using techniques originally developed in
embryonic stem cells.
Working with researchers at McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School,
Wernig and his colleagues grafted the lab-made dopamine neurons into
rats.
Parkinson's is a motor system disorder caused by damage to or the
death of dopamine neurons and characterized by tremors, impaired
balance and co-ordination and stiffness of the limbs and trunk.
Four weeks after surgery, the rats were tested for dopamine-related
behaviour in a test which typically causes them to walk in circles
towards the side. Eight of the nine rats that received the dopamine
neuron transplants showed markedly less or even no circling.
Eight weeks after surgery, the researchers could see that the
dopamine neurons had extended into the surrounding brain.
'We have shown that the reprogrammed cells have the potential to be
used therapeutically, but we still need to find better and safer ways
to generate the cells,' said Wernig. tf.TFN-
Europe_newsdesk@
http://www.hemscott
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StemCells subscribers may also be interested in these sites:
Children's Neurobiological Solutions
http://www.CNSfoundation.org/
Cord Blood Registry
http://www.CordBlood.com/at.cgi?a=150123
The CNS Healing Group
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CNS_Healing
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