Parkinson's in Mice Treated By Cloning
Posted on: Monday, 24 March 2008, 15:00 CDT
A U.S. and Japanese study used therapeutic cloning to treat Parkinson's disease in mice.
The nucleus taken from skin cells from the tail of the mouse were used to generate customized dopamine neurons.
The study, published online in Nature Medicine, found mice receiving dopamine neurons from the individually matched stem cell lines showed neurological improvement. But when these neurons were grafted into mice that did not genetically match the transplanted cells, the cells did not survive well and the mice did not recover.
The researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York -- led by study senior author Dr. Lorenz Studer and lead author Dr. Viviane Tabar -- collaborated with scientists at the Riken Institute in Kobe, Japan. They say this is the first time therapeutic cloning, also known as somatic-cell nuclear transfer has been shown to treat Parkinson's disease in mice.
In somatic-cell nuclear transfer, the nucleus of a cell taken from the body of the donor subject is used to replace an egg's nucleus. This cell develops into a blastocyst from which embryonic stem cells are taken for therapeutic purposes, the researchers say.
Since the genetic information in the resulting stem cells comes from the donor subject, they are not attacked by the immune system when used to treat the donor subject, the study says.
Source: United Press International
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