Parkinson's disease and mesenchymal stem cells: potential for cell-based therapy.
Kitada M and Dezawa M, two prominent researchers of Tohoku University Graduate School of Medicine, Sendai, Japan, noted that cell transplantation holds a great potential for treating Parkinson’s disease, and numerous other diseases.
According to them, the stem cells are easily accessible and are devoid of serious technical and ethical problems and are the appropriate candidates for transplantation. Stem cell therapy is a unique way to repair or replace the damaged or dead cells in the disease process, and re-establish cell function and alleviate symptoms. Thus, such cells may bring about improvement in clinical manifestations of neurodegenerative diseases and neural injuries.
The Comprehensive and Original Publication
Article Abstract
Cell transplantation is a strategy with great potential for the treatment of Parkinson's disease, and many types of stem cells, including neural stem cells and embryonic stem cells, are considered candidates for transplantation therapy. Mesenchymal stem cells are a great therapeutic cell source because they are easy accessible and can be expanded from patients or donor mesenchymal tissues without posing serious ethical and technical problems. They have trophic effects for protecting damaged tissues as well as differentiation ability to generate a broad spectrum of cells, including dopamine neurons, which contribute to the replenishment of lost cells in Parkinson's disease. This paper focuses mainly on the potential of mesenchymal stem cells as a therapeutic cell source and discusses their potential clinical application in Parkinson's disease.
Strategy for MSC transplantation in PD patients
MSCs can be obtained from fat tissue or bone marrow aspirates of Parkinson's disease (PD) patients and are applicable for autocell transplantation. They can also be obtained from fat tissue, bone marrow aspirates, and umbilical cord of healthy donors for allocell transplantation. Naive MSCs can be directly transplanted into the striatum of PD patients, but this treatment exerts temporary trophic effects. Gene-introduced MSCs also have trophic effects for the replenishment of lost cells. MSCs are able to be induced into dopamine neurons that will contribute to the functional recovery of PD.
Induction of dopamine neurons from MSCs
After NICD introduction, MSCs become similar to NPCs, expressing the NPC markers nestin, GLAST, 3-PDGH, and neuroD. After cytokine stimulation (bFGF, CNTF and forskolin (FSK)), cells become postmitotic neurons expressing neuronal markers such as neurofilament, Tuj-1, and MAP-2. The administration of GDNF induces neurons to become dopamine neurons (TH), which are useful in the Parkinson's disease model. Pictures from J Clin Invest 113 (2004) 1701–1710 and J Cereb Blood Flow Metab 29 (2009) 1409–1420 [17, 46].