Stem cell therapy to treat Parkinson's disease

Local scientists have developed new technology, which offers hope for the treatment of Parkinson's disease.

They have cooperated with Shanghai's Ruijin Hospital to carry out autologous stem cell research on Parkinson's disease, boosting new development of regenerative medicine and precise medicine.

The team, led by Chen Yuejun at the Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology of Chinese Academy of Sciences, created a new technique to successfully decode the differentiation process of dopaminergic neural cells in the brain and discover a surface marker of such cells. Based on it, they developed a new solution for cell therapy for Parkinson's disease.

According to Chen, dopamine acts like a messenger in the brain delivering information. Its dysfunction is closely related with Parkinson's disease, the second leading degenerative disease in the world.

The degenerative changes of dopaminergic neuron is the major reason for the disease, which affects about 4 million people in China. Among people over 65 years old, the incidence of Parkinson's disease is 1.7 percent in the nation, imposing a big challenge to the aging society.

Traditional medication only can improve symptoms and have serious side effects.

Transplanting nerve cells is considered the most potential treatment for degenerative diseases like Parkinson's. Scientists have targeted pluripotent stem cells, a type of stem cell, to be developed into dopaminergic neural cells and transplanted into patients' brain to achieve regeneration of nerves and lost function recovery. But there are many technical challenges to introduce the theory into clinical practice.

The achievement of Chen's team has offered a strong technical support to the treatment.

Based on the surface marker discovered by them, they can greatly improve the proportion of dopaminergic neuron after transplantation in the brain, an important step ensuring a safe and effective cell replacement therapy for Parkinson's disease. So far, the team has applied for three international patents.

The achievement was published by world-leading journal Stem Cell and attracted much attention both home and abroad.