StemCell Therapy

Dopamine is a naturally occurring chemical that plays several key roles in the brain and body.

But the use of foetal tissue is fraught with practical and ethical problems.

So Takahashi and his colleagues, in a medical first, substituted so-called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), which can be easily made from human skin or blood.

Within a year, some monkey's who had could barely stand up gradually recovered mobility.

"They became more active, moving more rapidly and more smoothly," Takahashi said by email. Animals that had taken to just sitting "start walking around in the cage."

"These findings are strong evidence that human iPSC-derived dopaminergic neurons can be clinically applicable to treat Parkinson's patients," he said.

Experts not involved in the research described the results as encouraging.

The treatment, if proven viable, "has the potential to reverse Parkinson's by replacing the dopamine cells that have been lost -- a groundbreaking feat," said David Dexter, deputy research director at Parkinson's UK.

"Not only did the new cells survive... but they also integrated with the existing neuronal network," he said.

Neurons made from foetal tissue grafted into brains have been known to survive for more than a decade, and the researchers said they expected those derived from iPSCs to last just as long.

Tilo Kunath, Parkinson's Senior Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, said the outcome was "extremely promising," and highlighted the advantage of avoiding stem cells extracted from human foetal tissue.

"It means that this therapy can be used in any country worldwide," including Ireland and most of South America, where medical use of human embryonic stem cells is banned.

The results, reported in the journal Nature, were not the same for the dozen monkeys in the experiment, each of which received donor neurons from a different person.

"Some were made with cells from healthy donors, while others were made from Parkinson's disease patients," said lead author Tetsuhiro Kikuchi, also from Kyoto University.

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Human stem cells restore mobility in Parkinson's monkeys: study - Times LIVE

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