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Adult Stem Cell Research Reverses Effects of Parkinson’s Disease in Human Trial

September 2nd, 2009

From KifeNews.com:

Scientists have published a paper in a medical journal describing the results of the world’s first clinical trial using autologous neural stem cells for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease. A leading bioethics watchdog says the results show more money should be put behind adult stem cells.

UCLA researchers published their results in February issue of the Bentham Open Stem Cell Journal which outlines the long term results of the trial.

“We have documented the first successful adult neural stem cell transplantation to reverse the effects of Parkinson’s disease and demonstrated the long term safety and therapeutic effects of this approach,” says lead author Dr. Michel Levesque.

The paper describes how Levesque’s team was able to isolate patient-derived neural stem cells, multiply them in vitro and ultimately differentiate them to produce mature neurons before they are reintroduced into the brain.

The team was able to inject the adult stem cells without the need for immunosuppressants. Unlike embryonic stem cells, adult stem cell injections don’t cause a patient’s immune system to reject the cells.

The adult stem cells were highly beneficial for the patient involved in the study.

“Of particular note are the striking results this study yielded — for the five years following the procedure the patient’s motor scales improved by over 80% for at least 36 months,” Levesque wrote.

He said he hoped a larger clinical trial would replicate the findings.

Dr. David Prentice, a former biology professor at Indiana State University who is now a fellow with the Family Research Council, tells LifeNews.com that the results of the study are wonderful news for patients.

“This evidence had been presented previously, but we now have the peer-reviewed scientific evidence for the effectiveness of adult stem cells in alleviating Parkinson’s symptoms,” he said. “While the data show that the technique needs refinement, this patient went for several years with little to no symptoms of his disease, even with only half of the brain treated with his own adult stem cells.”

Prentice says the results continue to prove that adult stem cells outpace their embryonic counterparts.

“People need to take notice that it is not embryonic stem cells that provide promise of treatments in the future, but rather it is adult stem cells that are already providing safe and effective therapies for patients now, without the problems of rejection or tumors,” Prentice explains.

“We need to pour our resources, especially taxpayer dollars, into adult stem cell research to foster more and better treatments and put the patients first,” he told LifeNews.com.

Levesque is a principal investigator for NeuroGeneration, a biotechnology company, and is affiliated with the UCLA School of Medicine and the Brain Research Institute.

Watching Stem Cells Repair the Human Brain

August 26th, 2009

TAU researcher shows viability of bone marrow stem cells with unique MRI tracking methods

From aftau.org:

There is no known cure for neurodegenerative diseases such as Huntington’s, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. But new hope, in the form of stem cells created from the patient’s own bone marrow, can be found — and literally seen — in laboratories at Tel Aviv University.

Dr. Yoram Cohen of TAU’s School of Chemistry has recently proven the viability of these innovative stem cells, called mesenchymal stem cells, using in-vivo MRI. Dr. Cohen has been able to track their progress within the brain, and initial studies indicate they can identify unhealthy or damaged tissues, migrate to them, and potentially repair or halt cell degeneration. His findings have been reported in the journal Stem Cells.

“By monitoring the motion of these cells, you get information about how viable they are, and how they can benefit the tissue,” he explains. “We have been able to prove that these stem cells travel within the brain, and only travel where they are needed. They read the chemical signalling of the tissue, which indicate areas of stress. And then they go and try to repair the situation.”

Tracking live cells in the brain

Dr. Yoram Cohen

To test the capabilities of this innovative new stem cells, Dr. Cohen created a study to track the activity of the live cells within the brain using the in-vivo MRI at the Strauss Centre for Computational Neuro-Imaging. Watching the live, active cells has been central to establishing their viability as a therapy for neurodegenerative disease.

Dr. Cohen and his team of researchers took magnetic iron oxide nanoparticles and used them to label the stem cells they tested. When injected into the brain, they could then be identified as clear black dots on an MRI picture. The stem cells were then injected into the brain of an animal that had an experimental model of Huntington’s disease. These animals suffer from a similar neuropathology as the one seen in human Huntington’s patients, and therefore serve as research tool for the disease.

On MRI, it was possible to watch the stem cells migrating towards the diseased area of the brain. “Cells that go toward a certain position that needs to be rescued are the best indirect proof that they are live and viable,” explains Dr. Cohen. “If they can migrate towards the target, they are alive and can read chemical signalling.”

An ethically viable stem cell

This study is based on differentiated mesenchymal cells (MSC), which were discovered at Tel Aviv University. Bone marrow cells are transformed into NTFs-secreting stem cells, which can then be used to treat neurodegenerative diseases. This advance circumvents the ethical debate caused by the use of stem cells obtained from embryos.

Although there is a drawback to using this particular type of stem cell — the higher degree of difficulty involved in rendering them “neuron-like” — the benefits are numerous. “Bone marrow-derived MSCs bypass ethical and production complications,” says Dr. Cohen, “and in the long run, the cells are less likely to be rejected because they come from the patients themselves. This means you don’t need immunosuppressant therapy.”

Working towards a real-life therapy

Dr. Cohen says the next step is to develop a real-life therapy for those suffering from neurodegenerative diseases. The ultimate goal is to repair neuronal cells and tissues. Stem cell therapy is thought to be the most promising future therapy to combat diseases such as Huntington’s, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, and researchers may also be able to develop a therapy for stroke victims. If post-stroke cell degeneration can be stopped at an early stage, says Dr. Cohen, patients can live for many years with a good quality of life.

In collaboration with Dr. Cohen, this work on tracking live stem cells in the brain was done by Noam Shemesh, a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Chemistry at Tel Aviv University, and Dr. Ofer Sadan from the group of Drs. Daniel Offen and Eldad Melamed from the Felsenstein Medical Research Center at the Rabin Medical Center

Folic Acid Supplementation in Patients with Parkinson’s Disease

July 20th, 2009

Summary: In a study involving patients with Parkinson’s disease and healthy controls, plasma levels of total homcysteine were increased by 30% in patients with Parkinson’s disease, and folic acid deficiency was found to be the major determinant of elevated t(Hcy) levels – as compared to healthy controls in whom vitamin B12 concentrations were found to be the major determinant of elevated t(Hcy) levels. Duration of disease was found to be positively associated with t(Hcy) levels and smoking was associated with low levels of folic acid in patients with PD. The authors conclude, “Considering the potential synergistic deleterious effects of Hcy increase and folate deficiency on the central nervous system, we postulate that folic acid should be supplemented to patients affected by PD in order to normalize blood Hcy and folate levels, therefore potentially avoiding these risk factors for neurologic deterioration in this disorder.”

Reference: “Evidence that folic acid deficiency is a major determinant of hyperhomocysteinemia in Parkinson’s disease,” dos Santos EF, Busanello EN, et al, Metab Brain Dis, 2009; 24(2): 257-69.

Adult Stem Cell Research Reverses Effects of Parkinson’s Disease in Human Trial

July 1st, 2009

From LifeNews.com:
Scientists have published a paper in a medical journal describing the results of the world’s first clinical trial using autologous neural stem cells for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease. A leading bioethics watchdog says the results show more money should be put behind adult stem cells.

UCLA researchers published their results in February issue of the Bentham Open Stem Cell Journal which outlines the long term results of the trial.

The adult stem cells were highly beneficial for the patient involved in the study.

He said he hoped a larger clinical trial would replicate the findings.

Prentice says the results continue to prove that adult stem cells outpace their embryonic counterparts.

“We need to pour our resources, especially taxpayer dollars, into adult stem cell research to foster more and better treatments and put the patients first,” he told LifeNews.com.

Levesque is a principal investigator for NeuroGeneration, a biotechnology company, and is affiliated with the UCLA School of Medicine and the Brain Research Institute.

First Early-detection Blood Test for Parkinson’s Shows Promise

June 28th, 2009

From MichaelJFox.org:

A test that profiles molecular biomarkers in blood could become the first accurate diagnostic test for Parkinson’s disease, new research shows.

The screen relies on changes in dozens of small molecules in serum. These “metabolomic” alterations form a unique pattern in people with Parkinson’s disease, according to a team led by researchers at the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City.

“A reliable blood test for Parkinson’s disease would revolutionize not only the care of people with this debilitating illness, it would facilitate research as well,” notes study senior author Dr. M. Flint Beal, chairman and Anne Parrish Titzell Professor of Neurology at Weill Cornell Medical College, and neurologist-in-chief at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center.

According to the National Parkinson Foundation, an estimated 1.5 million Americans have the neurodegenerative disease, and 60,000 new cases are diagnosed each year. Actor Michael J. Fox, boxer Muhammad Ali, and former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno all suffer from Parkinson’s, which strikes men and women in roughly equal numbers.

“Right now, a Parkinson’s diagnosis is made solely on a clinical review of symptoms — we have no biologic test,” notes Dr. Beal. At best, a symptom-based screen is still only 90 percent accurate, he adds.

“That can cause real problems, because that remaining 10 percent of patients — who may have look-alike conditions such as multi-system atrophy or progressive supranuclear palsy — end up getting treated with Parkinson’s drugs,” Dr. Beal says. “These medicines may appear to help them a little while, but in the meantime, they haven’t been getting the treatment that’s necessarily best for them.”

An early-detection test would also be enormously useful in tracking the health of patients who may be at higher risk for Parkinson’s, such as those with a family history of the disease.

Finally, the integrity of clinical trials is undermined by the lack of an accurate screen, Dr. Beal notes. “Every time you do a clinical trial into Parkinson’s and you have patients that are misdiagnosed, it enters ‘noise’ into the analysis, skewing the results. A truly reliable test could help eliminate that,” the researcher notes.

That’s why encouraging results for the new test — based on a patient’s “metabolomic profile” — are so important.

Metabolomics is the study of changes in thousands of distinct, very small molecules found in body fluids or tissues. “Anytime you have a genetic or environmental perturbation, these molecules are altered in specific ways,” Dr. Beal explains.

Because Parkinson’s treatment could itself trigger some of these alterations, the researchers first compared metabolomic patterns in the blood of Parkinson’s patients who were not undergoing treatment versus those who were medicated. “That gave us a ‘medication-free’ profile that we could use going forward,” Dr. Beal explains.

In the next stage of the research, the team compared blood samples from 66 patients with Parkinson’s disease against 25 healthy controls (most of whom were the patients’ spouses). The metabolomic analysis included over 2,000 small molecules found in the blood.

“We discovered a clear differentiation between the metabolomic profiles of the Parkinson’s disease patients versus those of the controls,” Dr. Beal says. “No one molecule was definitive, but a pattern of about 160 compounds emerged that was highly specific to Parkinson’s patients.”

The significance of many individual compounds to the disease remains unknown and will be the focus of future study. But changes in a few well-known metabolites linked to oxidative stress were clearly linked to Parkinson’s. These included low levels of the antioxidant uric acid; an increase in blood levels of another antioxidant, glutathione; and increased levels of a marker for oxidative damage called 8-OHdG.

“Together, these and other compounds were arranged into a metabolomic pattern that identified Parkinson’s disease with great accuracy,” Dr. Beal says.

He stressed that more work needs to be done to validate the finding, and a test that might be used routinely by doctors is still a few years away.

“We are currently enlarging the sample size and studying people at serial intervals, to see if this test might also serve as a benchmark for disease progression,” Dr. Beal says. “We are also looking at people who carry a gene for a familial form of Parkinson’s, but who do not have the illness now. We hope to track them over time to see if this metabolomic profile is predictive of disease onset.”

If those data prove as promising as this early trial, an early-detection blood test for Parkinson’s disease could someday become a reality. According to Dr. Beal, “That would be a big step forward for both the treatment and the study of this devastating illness.”

Findings are published in the journal Brain. Co-researchers include lead researcher Dr. Mikhail Bogdanov, of Weill Cornell Medical College and Bedford VA Medical Center, Bedford, Mass.; Dr. Wayne R. Matson, of Bedford VA Medical Center; Dr. Lei Wang, of Weill Cornell and Bedford VA Medical Center; and Dr. Rachel Saunders-Pullman and Dr. Susan S. Bressman, of Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York City.