 |
 |
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]