title: Cell therapies for Parkinson's disease: how far have we come?
abstract: Over the past three decades, significant progress has been made in the development of potential regenerative cell-based therapies for neurodegenerative disease, with most success being seen in Parkinson's disease. Cell-based therapies face many challenges including ethical considerations, potential for immune-mediated rejection with allogeneic and xenogeneic tissue, pathological spread of protein-related disease into the grafted tissue as well as the risk of graft overgrowth and tumorigenesis in stem cell-derived transplants. Preclinical trials have looked at many tissue types of which the most successful to date have been those using fetal ventral mesencephalon grafts, which led to clinical trials, which have shown that in some cases they can work very well. With important proof-of-concept derived from these studies, there is now much interest in how dopaminergic neurons derived from stem cell sources could be used to develop cell-based therapies suitable for clinical use, with clinical trials poised to enter the clinic in the next couple of years.
authors.affiliation: John van Geest Centre for Brain Repair, Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Cambridge, Forvie Site, Cambridge, CB2 0PY, UK.|Wellcome Trust - Medical Research Council Stem Cell Institute, University of Cambridge.
authors.forename: Thomas B
authors.initials: TB
authors.lastname: Stoker
authors.affiliation: John van Geest Centre for Brain Repair, Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Cambridge, Forvie Site, Cambridge, CB2 0PY, UK.|Wellcome Trust - Medical Research Council Stem Cell Institute, University of Cambridge.
authors.forename: Roger A
authors.initials: RA
authors.lastname: Barker
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D064987:Cell- and Tissue-Based Therapy; D059290:Dopaminergic Neurons / Q000166:cytology*; D006801:Humans; D010300:Parkinson Disease / Q000628:therapy*
keywords: Parkinson's disease; cell-based therapies; embryonic stem cells; fetal ventral mesencephalic tissue; induced pluripotent stem cells; neural grafting