I have been silently associated with the list for about 3 months since
my 82 yr mom was diagnosed.  She is doing ok on Sinemet so far.
 
I am a Scientific Administrator at the National Institutes of Health, in
the Allergy and Infectious Diseases Institute.  My job is to manage the
peer review of grants and contracts dealing with AIDS and other
areas of infectious disease research. About 80% of NIH $ are spent on
grants and  contracts to researchers in the US (and some overseas).  The
grants and contracts all must be peer reviewed and an active group of
scientists, who have left the "lab bench" do the administrative task of
managing the peer review system.  We do not personally review and score
applications. We find experts who agree to come to Bethesda, MD to do
the reviews.  We manage the review process and then we write up the
results.  The scores provided by the reviewers are used in the Fund/
Don't Fund decision process.
 
I use computer systems to search the research records of biomedical
scientists and scan the scientific literature.  Recently there
appeared an article that may be of importance/interest to those with
PD.
 
Page 16-17 of the New Scientist, 16 September 1995, article by Peter
Aldhous (full text below) indicates that researchers have identified the
protein trigger that causes undifferentiated brain cells to produce
dopamine, the chemical lacking in PD patients.  The goal now is to see
if many fetal (undifferentiated) brain cells can be stimulated (in
vitro) to produce dopamine prior to transplanting the fetal brain cells
in humans with PD.  The protein trigger, which has the rather unusual
name "Sonic Hedgehog (or SHH)" (scientists watch too much TV too), is an
important stimulus for brain cell function.
 
>From "The Scientist"; Vol. 147, No. 1995; 16 Sept 1995; pp.16-17; by
Peter Aldhous.
 
"One of the biggest obstacles blocking access to an experimental
treatment for Parkinson's Disease should soon be removed.  Biologists in
the US have discovered how to make cultured brain cells grow into
specialized nerve cells that are lost in Parkinson's. The discovery may
make brain cell transplants less controversial and more widely
available.
 
The tremors and muscle stiffenting of Parkinson's are caused by the
death of the brain cells that produce the neurotransmitter dopamine.
The conventional treatment, a drug called L-dopa, is only partly
effective, so researchers have tried transplanting dopamine neurons into
Parkinson's sufferers to replace the dyying cells.  But the cells must
be taken from aborted fetuses, and up to seven fetal brains are needed
to provide enough for a single transplant.
 
The process would be much more efficient - and less ethically
contentious - if large numbers of dopamine neurons could be grown in the
laboratory from a timy amount of fetal brain tissue.  But while
researchers have managed to culture other cell types, they have failed
to grow the key dopamine cells needed by Parkinson's sufferers.
 
Now researchers, led by Mary Hynes and Arnon Rosenthal of Genetech in
California, have identified the chemical trigger that turns an
undifferentiated brain cell into a dopamine neuron.  It is a protein
called Sonic hedgehog, one of the most important signalling molecules in
vertebrate development.
 
Last year, the same researchers showed that the trigger came from cells
in a structure in the embryonic brain called the floor plate, which
dopamine cells brush past while migrating to their eventual home in a
part of the brain called the substantia nigra.  Cells in the floor plate
carry Sonic hedgehog on their surfaces, and the researchers have shown
that inhibiting the protein's production prevents the formation of
dopamine neurons.
 
Working with researchers at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore
and the University of California, San Francisco, Hynes and Rosenthal
then tried adding different concentrations of Sonic hedgehog to cultured
brain cells.  High concentrations of the protein turned all the cultured
neurons into floor plate cells.  But if the quantity of the protein was
reduced slightly, the culture yielded a mixture of floor plate cells and
dopamine neurons (This was published in the Journal "Neuron", V. 15, p.
35).
 
The researchers are now further refining their culture techniques. "What
we need to do is to find the exact dose that gives dopamine neurons",
says Hynes.  They also are trying to culture the undifferentiated cells
for longer before adding Sonic hedgehog, so that they can grow larger
numbers of cells.  Other researchers working on Parkinson's
transplantation are enthusiastic about the breakthrough. "We're going to
try and get some Sonic hedgehog from them", says Clive Svendsen of the
Medical Council's Centre for Brain Repair in Cambridge.
 
END
 
___________
The Scientist is a British journal and it has American offices in
Washington, DC Phone 202-331-2080 and Fax 202 331-2082, Barbara Thurlow
is in charge of Administration.
___________
 
For those interested in science sources on the World Wide Web other
than the extensive PD resources mentioned by others in the group, some
pages are:
 
National Institutes of Health:  http://www.nih.gov/
_____________
 
For Neurology info:  http://neuro.med.cornell.edu/vl/
_____________
 
For information on NIH funded grants the CRISP database on Gopher
can be accessed at:       gopher://gopher.nih.gov;70/11/res/crisp
 
_________
The NIH home page on the WWW can point you to a number of resources for
scientific info.  In addition, for those interested in very recent,
research results in scientific journals, there is a private company
(Uncover is the name) that can provide the title pages of every
issue of many scientific journals.  There is a fee but the site also has
some interesting facets at little to no cost. You might want to
access the  Uncover URL on the WWW to see what they offer.
 
The URL of Uncover on the WWW is:
 
http://carl/.org/uncover/unchrome.html
 
____________
 
Thanks for your time:  This is a long message but it may be of interest.
The PD group has provided my mother a lot of info and I am heartened by
your resourcefulness.  Let's get that cure.  We are so very close.
 
Peter R. Jackson, PhD
Chief
AIDS Clinical and Epidemiology Research Review Branch
Scientific Review Program
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
National Institutes of Health
Solar Bldg, Rm 4C10
6003 Executive Blvd
Bethesda, MD 20892
 
email is :   [log in to unmask]