Stem cells in the brains of some Parkinson’s patients are increasingly damaged as they age, an effect that eventually diminishes their ability to replicate and differentiate into mature cell types. Researchers studied neural stem cells created from patients’ own skin cells to identify the defects. The findings offer a new focus for therapeutics that target the cellular change.
The report, published today in Nature, takes advantage of the ability to model diseases in cell culture by turning patient’s own cells first into so-called induced pluripotent stem cells and then into disease-relevant cell types—in this case, neural stem cells. The basis of these techniques was recognized with a Nobel Prize in medicine last week.
The authors studied cells taken from patients with a heritable form of Parkinson’s that stems from mutations in a gene. After growing several generation of neural stem cells derived from patients with that mutation, they saw the cell nuclei start to develop abnormal shapes. Those abnormalities compromise the survival of the neural stem cells, says study coauthor Ignacio Sancho-Martinez of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California.
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