Dopaminergic differentiation ex vivo from human skin samples
2014
Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom
Parkinson's disease is a neurological disorder characterized by a massive loss of dopaminergic neurons. Despite being one of the most investigated neural pathologies, no effective cure has been discovered. In recent years, with the advancement of stem cell research, cell replacement therapies are surging as a real possibility to be applied for Parkinson's disease. Here, human epidermal neural crest stem cells are obtained from human samples of hairy skin to be differentiated into neural stem cells, that will be further maturated into dopaminergic neurons. The results show that after the first step of differentiation towards neural stem cell-like cells and a maturation step with defined factors, all the cells in culture had dopaminergic neuron-like gene expression patterns similar to those found in vivo in the human substantia nigra. The researchers propose in this study a new accessible cell source for ex vivo production of dopaminergic neurons in an easy-to-apply protocol. This could be further developed to establish fully functional neurons that could be used in Parkinson's disease cell therapy strategies.
Differentiation of human epidermal neural crest stem cells (hEPI-NCSC) into virtually homogenous populations of dopaminergic neurons
Maya Sieber-Blum
Added on: 08-31-2021
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12015-013-9493-9[2] https://data.jrc.ec.europa.eu/dataset/a8fd26ef-b113-47ab-92ba-fd2be449c7eb
