Pretreatment of tissue for transplantation in Parkinson's disease
2018
University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland
Parkinson's disease is a devastating neurodegenerative disorder with no effective cure characterized by a massive loss of dopaminergic neurons that leads to motor dysfunction, cognitive decline and, ultimately, death. Recently, cell replacement therapy has attracted growing attention as a possible treatment strategy. However, low survival and suboptimal graft integration have limited its application. Here, pretreatment of fetal ventral mesencephalic tissue with neurotrophin-4/5 and glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor is tested to improve the outcome of dopaminergic neurons transplantation. The results show that the treatment with both factors increased the number of tyrosine hydroxylase positive neurons and the dopamine content in the culture supernatant. Additionally, the cell viability was also increased after treatment. Overall, this study shows that pretreatment of donor tissue with neurotrophin-4/5 and glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor leads to the production of dopaminergic neurons and increases cell survival, which can be a step forward towards the application of cell transplantation of dopaminergic neurons in Parkinson's disease.
A combination of NT-4/5 and GDNF is favorable for cultured human nigral neural progenitor cells
Hans R. Widmer
Added on: 09-01-2021
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0963689717753188[2] https://data.jrc.ec.europa.eu/dataset/a8fd26ef-b113-47ab-92ba-fd2be449c7eb
