Thursday, 17 November 2011 09:59

Investigating Parkinson’s disease with stem cells and immune cells Featured

In a collaborative research project, scientists from the University Hospital Erlangen under the direction of Prof. Dr. med. Jürgen Winkler in the Department of Molecular Neurology, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies under Fred Gage and the University of California San Diego (UCSD) in La Jolla aim to use stem cells and immune cells to find out what part inflammation processes play in Parkinson’s disease.


The researchers plan to develop human-specific disease models. To do this, they use small skin tissue pieces taken from patients are suffering from Parkinson’s disease. The samples are cultivated in the laboratory and then the transformed back into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS), which the researchers can then use to produce nerve cells or supporting tissue cells with the help of differentiation factors. These cells serve as individual cell models for further experiments, as opposed to earlier approaches, e.g. using animal models.

Work on patient-specific nerve cells is important to be able to research the reasons why the disease can take a different course from patient to patient. In order to verify and understand the cerebral inflammatory processes assumed to be causal for Parkinson’s disease, a protein called NURR1, also known as NR4A2, will be investigated. This protein plays a part in maintaining the dopaminergic system. There are a total of one million dopaminergic cells in the human brain, and their decline leads to the clinical picture of Parkinson’s disease.

The scientific cooperative wants to investigate whether substances targeting to the NURR path can influence the process of the Parkinson’s disease.

Sources: http://www.biotechnologie.de/BIO/Navigation/DE/Foerderung/foerderbeispiele,did=140554.html
http://www.biologische-psychologie.de/entries/1829