Researchers at Memorial-Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) have announced a very promising development in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease. They’ve used a process called somatic-cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) in laboratory mice, which led to neurological improvement deemed successful in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease. The research team expressed hope for further studies that might lead to similar cures in humans and in other diseases that affect other organ systems.

SCNT, also known as therapeutic cloning, involves a process of manipulating the nucleus of a cell and transplanting it back into the subject, thereby bypassing the risk of rejection by the immune system, as happens when tissue or organs are introduced from a separate donor subject.

In the MSKCC experiments, led by senior author Lorenz Studer, MD, head of MSKCC’s Stem Cell and Tumor Biology Laboratory, and lead author Viviane Tabar, MD, also a stem cell scientist and neurosurgeon at MSKCC, researchers removed the nucleus from a mouse egg and replaced it with the nucleus taken from the somatic cell of a donor mouse. The manipulated cell then developed into a blastocyst, at which point, embryonic stem cells could be harvested and manipulated in an effort to achieve the desired therapeutic effect.

The MSKCC researchers, working in collaboration with Japanese scientists at Kobe’s Riken Institute, worked with skin cells from the subject mouse’s tail and customized it to mimic Parkinson’s disease, which is characterized by an absence of dopamine neurons within the cells. When the SCNT procedure was performed, the mice receiving it enjoyed significant improvement in neurological function when the grafted cells came from their own transplanted cellular tissue. Mice receiving grafted cells outside their own stem cell, or genetic, line did not recover from Parkinson’s disease.

Results of this promising study have been published in March 23’s online edition of Nature Medicine. The research was supported by the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, the Michael W. McCarthy Foundation, the Kinetics Foundation, the Starr Tri-institutional Stem Cell Initiative, and the US National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Teruhiko Wakayama led the Japanese collaboration.

Source: Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center