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Published online 20 July 2009 | Nature News Setback for Huntington's disease therapy"Brain-tissue transplants don't last very long in patients. Lizzie Buchen "A once-promising clinical therapy for Huntington's disease needs to head back to the lab, research suggests... Neurosurgeon Thomas Freeman of the University of South Florida in Tampa and his colleagues have analysed the brains of three people with Huntington's disease who received fetal striatal-tissue transplants a decade before they died. But instead of slowing or stopping the progress of the disease, the grafts degenerated even more severely than the patients' own tissue. "Based on our earlier results we were expecting that the grafts would endure," says Freeman. "This tells us we'll have to do a lot of work in the laboratory before going back to the clinic." full text of news report at: http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090720/full/news.2009.706.html There's an interesting interview with the above authors about neural transplantation and debate on the interpretation of this data and its effect on future PD research on the MJFF Online Research Forum. see: http://www.pdonlineresearch.org/responses/911/251/neural-transplants-patients-huntingtons- disease-undergo-disease-neuronal-degenerat And also see comment by authors of the research paper to Nature Medicine , who ran a news story about the study and noted its possible effect on PD research. "It is unfortunate that this news report did not have space to compare the results seen in our Huntington's disease transplant program to what we described in our transplanted patients with Parkinson's disease. In the latter program, only 5-8% of the transplanted neurons developed Lewy bodies. Also, grafts still survived and functioned clinically for over a decade. The article and the responses seem to cast a haze over the entire field of stem cells in general, which is certainly not accurate. The magnitude and mechanisms of neural degeneration that we reported was specific to grafts in patients with Huntington's disease. We are still enthusiastic about the potential of brain repair with stem cells for many different diseases. Our report also suggests new windows into opportunities for future research about the mechanism of and therapeutic options for Huntington's disease. Thomas Freeman, MD and Francesca Cicchetti, PhD" http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090720/full/news.2009.706.html __,_._,___ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn