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Parkinson’s disease is the second most common neurodegenerative disease in the United Kingdom and is currently affecting about 120,000 people there. More than half a million Americans are affected by it any given time and about 50,000 Americans are diagnosed with Parkinson’s every year. Those numbers are likely to increase as people are living longer and the disease becomes more prevalent as we age.
“Parkinson’s disease affects movement, producing motor symptoms, such as tremor, rigidity, bradykinesia (slowness of movement) and postural instability. It also produces non-motor symptoms, including autonomic dysfunction, cognitive and neurobehavioral problems, and sensory and sleep difficulties.
Most people with Parkinson’s disease are described as having idiopathic Parkinson’s disease (having no specific known cause). There are far less common causes of Parkinson’s disease including genetic, toxins, head trauma, cerebral anoxia, and drug-induced Parkinson’s disease.” – Wikipedia.
Induced pluripotent stem (IPS) cells
Stem cells have the ability to become any kind of cell found in the human body. The earliest experiments involved stem cells derived from human embryos, but there was a breakthough in 2007 when scientists developed induced pluripotent stem (IPS) cells, which can originate from many parts of the body. Pluripotency refers to a stem cell that has the potential to differentiate into any of the three germ layers: endoderm (interior stomach lining, gastrointestinal tract, the lungs), mesoderm (muscle, bone, blood, urogenital), or ectoderm (epidermal tissues and nervous system). Induced pluripotent stem cells are artificially constructed from cells that don’t have that property themselves.
Pluripotent cells (natural or induced) lack the ability to develop into embryos. However, they have proven able to exhibit many of the advantages of embryonic stem cells without any of the ethical downsides.
Using IPS cells to try to treat Parkinson’s
An Oxford University team will use adult stem cells to study the potential of using a person’s stem cells to treat Parkinson’s disease. They will use skin cells to grow the kind of neurons that die in the brains of Parkinson’s sufferers. Researchers will be take skin cells from 1,000 patients with early stage Parkinson’s and will then convert them into nerve cells carrying the disease to learn more about the brain disorder.
The new technique is particularly useful because it is difficult to obtain samples of diseased nerve tissue from patient biopsies. It will enable the researchers to create limitless quantities of nerve cells for use in experiments and to test new drugs. In this study the researchers will compare the functioning of cells taken from patients with the disease and those without to better understand why dopamine neurons die in patients with Parkinson’s.
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