Radical new therapy for Parkinson’s will use stem cell transplants
Early next year, a radical new treatment for Parkinson’s disease involving tissue transplants will receive its first trial with patients – including a group from the UK. Stem cells grown in the laboratory and transformed into nerve cells will be used to replace those destroyed by the disease. It is hoped that these will stop the spread of debilitating symptoms.
“It has taken a long time to get to this stage but hopefully results from these trials will mean that, in a few years, we might be able to offer tissue transplants as standard treatments for Parkinson’s,” said Prof Roger Barker, of Cambridge University. “It is certainly a promising approach.”
In the UK, about 145,000 people live with Parkinson’s and about 18,000 new cases are diagnosed every year. The disease is triggered when nerve cells that supply dopamine to the brain start to die due to a combination of genetic and environmental factors.
Dopamine helps a person control movement. When supplies drop, the result is shaking, stiffness, depression and other symptoms that can end with patients using a wheelchair or being bed-ridden. The disease’s progress can be slowed by the drug L-dopa, which replaces some of the lost function of dopamine cells. Treatments become less effective over the years. Scientists have been searching for years for new approaches.
The new approach uses stem cells, from which all cells with specialised functions are generated in the human body. These stem cells can be grown in laboratory cultures. Even better, scientists have learned how to transform them into dopamine cells.
ارسال به دوستان