Embryonic stem cell therapy continues to advance. I bet Michael J. Fox, for one, is pretty happy today.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1508&ncid=751&e=10&u=/afp/20050104/hl_afp/healthjapandisease
Sorry I couldn't make the URL a link - it contains ampersands. Copy-paste it to go to the article. Here is a text version:
Japanese team succeeds in stem cell therapy on monkeys with Parkinson's
TOKYO (AFP) - Japanese researchers said they had successfully treated monkeys with Parkinson's disease (news - web sites) through a stem cell transplant, potentially paving the way for an ideal remedy to the intractable disease.
It was the first time such transplants have worked on primates suffering from the degenerative nerve disorder, said Nobuo Hashimoto, a medical doctor at the Department of Neurosurgery at Kyoto University Graduate School of Medicine.
"First, we have to confirm the effectiveness will last long," said Hashimoto, the chief researcher of the study.
"Once we can confirm the safety of the therapy, we want the method to be applied to humans," Hashimoto said. "We hope clinical applications on humans will be available in about five years."
"There are many approaches to curing the disease, such as strong drugs or destruction of troubled cells in the brain, but use of embryonic stem cells is seen as an ideal and fundamental therapy for the disease," he said.
The researchers extracted embryonic stem cells capable of releasing dopamine, a neurotransmitter, from fertilized eggs of cynomolgus monkeys.
It is a decline in production of dopamine that is believed to trigger Parkinson's disease, in which patients shake uncontrollably.
The embryonic stem cells were then transplanted into six cynomolgus monkeys, which had drug-induced symptoms similar to Parkinson's disease in humans.
Three months later, the monkeys' symptoms such as trembling hands had lessened, Hashimoto said.
Details of the experiment were published on the website of the Journal of Clinical Investigation on Tuesday.