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The promise of stem cells in Parkinson disease
J. William Langston
Parkinson’s Institute, Sunnyvale, California, USA.
Address correspondence to: J. William Langston, The Parkinson’s Institute, 1170 Morse Avenue, Sunnyvale, California 94089-1605, USA. Phone: (408) 734-2800; Fax: (408) 734-8522; E-mail: jwlangston@thepi.org.
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Published January 3, 2005 - More info
J Clin Invest. 2005;115(1):23–25. https://doi.org/10.1172/JCI24012.
© 2005 The American Society for Clinical Investigation
The possibility of repairing the damaged human brain has been a dream of physicians and scientists for decades. Over time it has become obvious that Parkinson disease is a natural first when it comes to tackling this ambitious feat, primarily because the majority of the signs and symptoms appear to result from the progressive loss of cells in a small area known as the substantia nigra, which sits atop the brain stem. These cells make dopamine, which is delivered to a part of the basal ganglia known as the striatum; when nigral neurons die and striatal dopamine diminishes, the signs and symptoms of Parkinson disease become manifest. Thus, replenishing missing neurons in a limited area of the brain should in theory reverse parkinsonism, making this an attractive approach. But the challenge of actually replacing injured and/or lost neurons in the adult human nervous system has proven to be a daunting task with far more bumps in the road, both political and scientific, than anyone would have anticipated.
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Neurotransplantation: trials and tribulations
While stem cell therapy is very much in the forefront when approaches to brain repair and cell replacement therapy are being considered, there is already a substantial body of work in the Parkinson disease field involving neurotransplantation, including the use of both adult adrenomedullary tissue and human fetal mesencephalic tissue (which is rich in dopaminergic [DA] neurons); the lessons learned should not be ignored. While adrenomedullary transplantation proved to be something of a medical fiasco, with little efficacy and unacceptable morbidity and mortality, a number of the early open label trials with human fetal mesencephalic tissue appeared to be very promising. However, due to a ban on the use of federal funds for research utilizing human fetal tissue imposed by then-President Ronald Reagan, little work was done in this area until President Bill Clinton lifted this moratorium on his second day in office. Not long thereafter, 2 large controlled clinical trials aimed at using fetal human mesencephalic tissue transplanted to the striatum to treat Parkinson disease were launched with federal funding. However, to the surprise of many, both trials failed to show a significant clinical benefit based on their primary endpoint variables (1, 2) in spite of substantial evidence of graft survival based on both autopsy (3) and imaging studies. Unfortunately, a substantial subset of patients also developed persistent excessive movements known as dyskinesias (2). Dyskinesias are typically a consequence of long-term L-dopa therapy, but in the patients receiving transplants, these movements persisted even after L-dopa was discontinued, raising serious safety concerns.
Why didn’t this approach work? Theories range from poor graft survival to the possibility that low-grade inflammation interfered with graft function. But the reality is that we still don’t know. Why is all this relevant to the use of stems cell to treat Parkinson disease? First, strategies used in fetal cell transplantation are essentially the same as those which will be applied with DA stem cells, but we are now in a quandary regarding this entire approach. A second hurdle relates to the vast technical barriers that are being encountered in the process of learning how to use stem cells to treat any human disease. With regard to Parkinson disease, the first task has been to create authentic DA cell lines that can be used to replace the missing neurons in the nigrostriatal system, and the second to get those cells to persist in vivo without forming tumors. While this has been an intensive area of research, there are only a limited number of successes so far, and these have been achieved primarily in rodents (4–7). For these reasons, the current report by Takagi and colleagues in this issue of the JCI is of great interest (8). These investigators have prepared what appear to be authentic DA neurons and used those cells to reverse parkinsonism in a primate model of the disease (Figure 1). This is important because treatment of 1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine–induced (MPTP-induced) parkinsonism in primates (the model used here) has proven highly predictive of new symptomatic approaches in the treatment of Parkinson disease. Yet we still have a long way to go.
Figure 1Pluripotent embryonic stem cells are obtained from the inner cell mass of the blastocyst stage of development. These cells have the potential to develop into any tissue type. A variety of different treatments or “cocktails” have been devised to coax these cells into developing into a neuronal lineage and then into authentic DA neurons. Green, BrdU; red, tyrosine hydroxylase–positive (TH-positive) DA neurons (8). These are then used for cell replacement therapy by transplantation into the area of the brain where DA nigrostriatal neurons have degenerated. To date, almost all fetal cell transplants have involved putting these cells into the striatum (which lies deep in the brain, below the shaded area in the figure) as have most experimental studies. However, it is still not clear that this is the best target area; it is also possible that it will be necessary to transplant the cells to multiple sites, including the substantia nigra. The major challenge at the current time appears to be getting transplanted DA embryonic stem cells to maintain their DA phenotype in large numbers and over a prolonged period of time.
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