Parkinson’s disease causes the progressive loss of nerve cells that release dopamine, a chemical that helps control body movement. The researchers triggered a similar loss of cells in macaque monkeys, then used human stem cells to replace them.
They hope to have human clinical trials in 2018.
The animals showed significant improvement in their symptoms two years after having precursor dopamine neurons derived from human stem cells transplanted into their brains.
These cells – known as induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells – are created by genetically reprogramming ordinary adult cells, so that they revert to an embryonic-like state.
I am ok. Gonna get a haircut today. Don’t get ur hopes up regarding stem cell therapy though. Because our problem is we still don’t understand sz. But this thing with parkinson and iPS cells is a major breakthrough and could be of significance to us down the line.
God only knows. Lets say scientists have their first stem cell therapy trial for Parkinson’s on humans in 5 years time + 2-5 years to wait for results, i would say 15yrs for Parkinson’s if everything goes smoothly. It should only take 5 to be honest but science and the med. field are so slow.
In our case as soon as we know what is going on, it could go quite fast, if stem cell therapy is up and running. But first we have to know what is going on.
My hopes are big for that new machine (I think it’s a scanner) that tracks/detects dopamine level throughout the brain.
They’ve actually been trying stem cell therapy with Parkinson’s since the 1990s. At that time it was very crude and used (trigger warning) what is best described as a fetal brain soup (end trigger).
Anyway those early tests had some limited success and there have been case studies for many years since then using induced stem cells which do not involve any fetal tissue.
So I don’t think it will take another 25 years to get something that works better (even the early transplants worked a little bit) in Parkinson’s, it could be awhile for sz.
One obstacle would seem to be that the neurons created from the skin of people with sz are not quite normal. They would probably have to find a way to correct this, or, use someone elses normal cells, but there is a risk of rejection just like organ transplant, and that can be very very serious, life threatening. But I don’t think it’s a problem that can never be overcome. My money is on correcting the sz neurons. But we’ll see.
I don’t think it will take 25 years like it has for Parkinsons because we’ve learned a lot from that research. But it will still take years.