Stem cell therapy has long been used to treat or prevent a disease or condition. Now, the new case shows that it may also cure Parkinson's Disease.
Recently, the United States Health Day News reported news with the title Parkinson's Patient Improving After First-Ever Stem Cell Therapy. For the first time, scientists have transformed Parkinson's patients' own skin cells into key brain cells, and have achieved considerable results.
Scientists used the patient's own skin cells to generate induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) in vitro, and then they differentiated the iPSCs into midbrain dopaminergic precursor cells. After testing, patient-specific dopaminergic precursor cells have the phenotypic characteristics of substantia nigra neurons, and experiments with humanized mouse models have shown that these cells lack immunogenicity.
Subsequently, these cells were implanted into the Parkinson's patient for two times at intervals of 6 months. The transplantation sites were the left and right hemisphere putamen, and the patient did not receive immunosuppressive treatment during this period. The positron emission tomography showed that the cells survived steadily in the patient. After 18-24 months of transplantation treatment, this patient's Parkinson's clinical symptoms tended to be stabilized or even improved.
"It has been two years since the stem cell transplantation treatment began, and the patient has not experienced serious side effects. Parkinson's clinical symptoms have been stabilized or even improved." The patient's attending doctor also said that the improvement is moderate, but before receiving stem cell transplantation, his condition deteriorated quickly, and this kind of condition had stopped after the treatment. This case gave Parkinson's patients great encouragement, proving the feasibility and safety of this stem cell transplantation treatment.
However, this treatment still takes a long time to maker a further exploration before it is widely promoted. First of all, it is difficult to popularize this therapy on a large scale since inducing the induction of pluripotent stem cells, and differentiating into dopaminergic progenitor cells require very high production routes. Secondly, how to benefit patients by transplantation? To solve this problem, it still needs many more practice. In the case, the 69-year-old patient reported that his life improved rapidly shortly after the operation. It does not rule out the possibility of other effects, and the mechanism of how stem cells improve the life of Parkinson's patients in a short period of time still requires further exploration.
Parkinson's incidence is the second, which is only lower than Alzheimer's disease. Acording to statistics, it is the second largest neurodegenerative disease, with an incidence of more than 2% in people over 65 years of age. Now, there are more than 10 million Parkinson's patients worldwide. However, at present, Parkinson's treatment is mainly to relieve symptoms, there is no cure, and cell transplantation is the most promising treatment for this disease. The principle is to increase the level of dopamine by transplanting cells into the striatum or midbrain substantia nigra of Parkinson's patients to achieve the purpose of improving exercise.
In addition to the induced pluripotent stem cells in the above case, the most widely used treatment in clinical studies are mesenchymal stem cells. Mesenchymal stem cells have the advantages of convenient material extraction, easy separation and culture, as well as autoimmunity without immunogenicity.
Stem cell transplantation is proved to have the potential to treat Parkinson's disease, and this case shows that iPSCs transplantation treatment is both feasible and safe, and can even block the progression of the disease and improve clinical conditions. This novel research report undoubtedly brought hope to the majority of patients with Parkinson's disease.
In recent years, more and more studies have confirmed that stem cell therapy, including induced pluripotent stem cells and mesenchymal stem cells, has clinical application prospects, which shows that the prospect of stem cell therapy for Parkinson's disease is also very promising.
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