Breakthrough in production of dopamine neurons for Parkinson's disease
"In our preclinical assessments of stem cell-derived dopamine neurons we noticed that the outcome in animal models varied dramatically, even though the cells were very similar at the time of transplantation. This has been frustrating and puzzling, and has significantly delayed the establishment of clinical cell production protocols," says Malin Parmar, who led the study conducted at Lund University as part of the EU network NeuroStemcellRepair . The Lund experiments use modern global gene expression studies to better understand the path from a stem cell to a dopamine neuron. The data has been generated in close collaboration with a team of scientists at Karolinska Institute lead by Professor Thomas Perlmann, and is closely linked with a second study from the same cluster of scientists. The second study sheds new light on how dopamine neurons are formed during development, and what makes them different from other similar and neighbouring neurons. This new insight has ena...