Scientists in the US made new brain cells by inserting reprogrammed adult skin cells into fetal mouse brains and then used them to reduce symptoms of Parkinson’s disease in rats. While this is a long way from demonstrating such a method might be effective in humans, it brings that hope a step closer.

US scientists developed new brain cells by placing reprogrammed adult skin cells into fetal mouse brains and used these cells to reduce indications of Parkinson’s disease in rats. There is still a long way to find whether this method will be effective in humans but there is surly a ray of hope.

The study has been published in the early online 7th April issue of PNAS, the funding of the National Academy of Sciences and is the research of lead author Dr Marius Wernig and colleagues.

Wernig is a postdoctoral researcher working with Rudolf Jaenisch, whose team at Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research first showed last December that adult mouse skin cells could be reprogrammed into a state that resembled embryonic stem cells and then used to treat mice with a human sickle-cell anemia disease trait.

The long term goal of such a process is to develop embryonic stem-cell like cells with patient-specific DNA for transplant therapy, because this tackless the problem of rejection by the recipient’s immune system which is what happens when the donor DNA is different.

According to Wernig this latest study was the “First display that reprogrammed cells can integrate into the neural system or positively affect neurodegenerative disease.”

“This experiment proves that vitro reprogrammed cells can be used to treat Parkinson’s disease principally,” stated Jaenisch.

In the experiment, Wernig and colleagues used instigated pluripotent stem cells (IPS cells). These act like embryonic stem cells in that they have the potential to give rise to a range of other cells, including brain cells. They are induced in that they are made by reprogramming adult skin cells, which in this case was done using retroviruses to introduce four genes into the nuclear DNA of the skin cells.

The genes were Oct4, Sox2, c-Myc and Klf4, the same ones that were found in the earlier research to change skin cells into pluripotent cells.

The newly reprogrammed IPS cells were then separated into two types: neural precursor cells and dopamine neurons. To do this the researchers used methods already proven with embryonic stem cells.

The researchers then took the neural precursor cells and transplanted them into the brains of mouse embryos which were then born naturally and examined nine weeks after transplantation.

Wernig and colleagues discovered new cell bunch around the transplant sites and they noticed quite a significant number had also migrated into the surrounding brain tissue.

In a second experiment, Wernig and colleagues used rats that had had some of the dopamine-producing neurons in their mid-brains destroyed so they showed symptoms of Parkinson’s. The researchers induced some IPS cells to differentiate into dopamine neurons and transplanted them into the rats’ brains.

Four weeks after transplant, the rats had decreased Parkinson’s symptoms .This was tested using amphetamine injections. When injected with amphetamine, rats with Parkinson’s tend to walk in circles, going to the side where there is less dopamine activity. Eight of the nine rats treated with the IPS cells showed either no circling act or significantly less.

Eight weeks after the transplant, the researchers discovered that the dopamine neurons had draggedinto the surrounding brain tissue.

Jaenisch opined that the experiment showed that in principle, reprogrammed cells could be used to treat Parkinson’s disease.

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