Researchers sniff out Parkinson's breakthrough

abc ^ | 06.16.08

[Coleus]

Australian scientists have discovered that stem cells found in the back of a patient's nose can produce the chemical which is missing in people with Parkinson's disease. Parkinson's disease occurs when the brain cells that produce the chemical dopamine stop working.  Without dopamine, nerve cells cannot function, leading to muscle problems.

Researchers from Griffith University and the University of Queensland harvested adult stem cells from the noses of Parkinson's disease patients.  They found that once the nose cells were cultured and infused into animals with Parkinson's disease, the cells began to produce dopamine.  Professor Peter Silburn from the University of Queensland said it was an important breakthrough, as the cells could be easily harvested from patients. He said the next step was to test the cells in primates, then move to human trials in the next three years.

[autumnraine]

Amazing breakthrough. I hope it works!

[Coleus]

Great Stem Cell Advance you never heard

Lots of news lately hasn't made it into the mainstream press.

One big item only covered by specialty news sources, but very significant, was news from Australian scientists that they had successfully treated Parkinson's disease in animals using human nasal adult stem cells. In some cases the nasal adult stem cells came from Parkinson's patients, indicating they could be the source of their own stem cell treatment.

There are numerous advantages to these adult stem cells:

Patient specific stem cells
Disease specific stem cells
Can generate the cells of interest in a disease
Can make them work in an animal model of disease
Takes 20 mins to get tissue in outpatient setting
One month to grow cells
Seventy lines established thus far
Being patient specific there are no transplant rejection issues
No cancer formation as with embryonic stem cells or induced pluripotent cells
Large numbers can be grown to study the disease and transplant the cells
No need for embryos, nuclear transfer cloning, animal-human hybrids
No need to inject new genes or retroviruses as in induced pluripotent cells
Highly efficient whereas embryo and reprogrammed skin cells are not
No ethical issues
No destruction of tissues
No need to hyperovulate women to get multiple eggs for embryo generation and cloning

The paper was published in the journal Stem Cells

This is the same group that showed in 2006 that they could get multiple tissue types from this adult stem cell source, including heart, nerve, liver, and brain cells.

 

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Olfactory Mucosa is a Potential Source for Autologous Stem Cell Therapy for Parkinson's Disease

Wayne Murrell ^1*, Andrew Wetzig ¹, Michael Donnellan ¹, François Féron ², Tom Burne ³, Adrian Meedeniya ¹, James Kesby ⁴, John Bianco ¹, Chris Perry ⁵, Peter Silburn ⁶, Alan Mackay-Sim ¹

¹ National Centre for Adult Stem Cell Research, Eskitis Institute for Cell and Molecular Therapies, Griffith University, Brisbane, QLD 4111 Australia.
² NICN, CNRS UMR6184, IFR Jean Roche & Centre d'Investigations Cliniques en Biothérapie CIC-B 150, AP-HM - Institut Paoli Calmettes - Inserm, Université de la Méditerranée, France
³ National Centre for Adult Stem Cell Research, Eskitis Institute for Cell and Molecular Therapies, Griffith University, Brisbane, QLD 4111 Australia.; School of Biomedical Sciences, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland 4072, Australia.
⁴ School of Biomedical Sciences, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland 4072, Australia.
⁵ Department of Otolaryngology, Princess Alexandra Hospital, Brisbane, QLD 4101 Australia.
⁶ National Centre for Adult Stem Cell Research, Eskitis Institute for Cell and Molecular Therapies, Griffith University, Brisbane, QLD 4111 Australia.; School of Medicine, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland 4072, Australia.

 

^* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: Wayne.Murrell@rr-research.no .

	Abstract

Parkinson's disease is a complex disorder characterised by degeneration of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra in the brain. Stem cell transplantation is aimed at replacing dopaminergic neurons because the most successful drug therapies affect these neurons and their synaptic targets. We show here that neural progenitors can be grown from the olfactory organ of persons even with Parkinson's disease. These neural progenitors proliferated and generated dopaminergic cells in vitro. They also generated dopaminergic cells when transplanted into the brain and reduced the behavioural asymmetry induced by ablation of the dopaminergic neurons in the rat model of Parkinson's disease. Our results indicate that Parkinson's patients could provide their own source of neuronal progenitors for cell transplantation therapies and for direct investigation of the biology and treatments of Parkinson's disease.