Medical News Briefs–Parkinson’s Disease May Be Treatable With Therapeutic Stem Cell Cloning

Parkinson’s Disease May Be Treatable With Therapeutic Cloning of Your own Cells–In animal model it appears to work.

A Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center Researcher has shown that therapeutic cloning, also known as somatic-cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), can be used to treat Parkinson’s disease in mice.

The nucleus of a skin cell from a subject is placed into an egg from which the nucleus has been removed. This cell then grows into a blastocyst from which embryonic stem cells can be removed and differentiated for therapeutic purposes. Because the genetic information in the newly formed stem cells comes from the donor subject, the cells that are created are spared attack by the immune system after transplantation. If the skin cell placed in the egg were allowed to continue growing it could in theory be a clone of the individual that donated the skin cell (although the mitochondrial DNA of the egg would be different).

These “cloned” stem cells were placed in the area of the brain that had parkinson’s disease and mice that received neurons derived from cloned stem cell lines showed improvement of their Parkinson’s disease.