Parkinson's disease can be cured by therapeutic cloning
An international group of scientists has successfully applied the method of therapeutic cloning for the treatment of Parkinson's disease in mice, the journal Nature Medicine reports.
Therapeutic cloning, or somatic cell nuclei transfer (PYASK) is a method of obtaining lines of polypotent stem cells with the genotype of a specific adult animal (or human). These cells are able to differentiate into cells of any tissues of the adult body, which can be used for the treatment of brain and spinal cord injuries and neurological diseases, in particular, Parkinson's disease.
Scientists from the USA and Japan conducted experiments on mice in which dopamine neurons in the central nervous system were destroyed, which was accompanied by a number of motor disorders similar to those observed in patients with Parkinson's disease. The head of the study, Lorenz Studer, and his colleagues from the Sloan-Kettering Institute (New York) transferred the nuclei of skin cells from 24 mice with Parkinsonism into donor eggs purified from their own hereditary material.
From embryos that developed to the blastocyst stage (that is, consisting of several dozen cells), scientists managed to obtain 187 lines of polypotent stem cells. These cells were used to produce dopamine neurons that were injected into the brains of six mice with Parkinson's disease, the researchers reported.
According to scientists, during 11 weeks of observation, the results of motor tests in all animals improved markedly, and none of them showed signs of transplant rejection.
The technique of therapeutic cloning is quite complex in technical terms and ambiguous from an ethical point of view, but it can be used to cure Parkinson's disease in mice, the study showed. In the future, it may become an effective method of combating Parkinson's disease in humans, scientists believe.
Source: Therapeutic cloning used to treat brain disease – New Scientist, 03/23/2008
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