Posts tagged PD

ScienceDaily (July 17, 2012) — Using adult stem cells, Johns Hopkins researchers and a consortium of colleagues nationwide say they have generated the type of human neuron specifically damaged by Parkinson’s disease (PD) and used various drugs to stop the damage.

Their experiments on cells in the laboratory, reported in the July 4 issue of the journal Science Translational Medicine, could speed the search for new drugs to treat the incurable neurodegenerative disease, but also, they say, may lead them back to better ways of using medications that previously failed in clinical trials.

"Our study suggests that some failed drugs should actually work if they were used earlier, and especially if we could diagnose PD before tremors and other symptoms first appear," says one of the study’s leaders, Ted M. Dawson, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Dawson and his colleagues, working as part of a National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke consortium, created three lines of induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells derived from the skin cells of adults with PD. Two of the cell lines had the mutated LRKK2 gene, a hallmark of the most common genetic cause of PD. Induced pluripotent stem cells are adult cells that have been genetically reprogrammed to their most primitive state. Under the right circumstances, they can develop into most or all of the 200 cell types in the human body.

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