BioCentury
ARTICLE | Tools & Techniques

Stem cell jackpot for Parkinson's disease

December 1, 2011 8:00 AM UTC

A Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center team has honed a protocol for producing large quantities of human dopaminergic neurons that could be used therapeutically by grafting them into patients with Parkinson's disease or as a platform for drug screening for the disease.1 But scaling up the protocol remains a challenge, and therapeutic applications face major regulatory issues due to potential safety concerns.

Parkinson's disease (PD) is caused by degeneration of dopaminergic neurons throughout the brain, the effects of which are felt most acutely in the substantia nigra, a midbrain region involved in movement...