Fueling Neuroscience with Human Pluripotent Stem Cells SciDoc Publishers | Open Access | Science Journals | Media Partners

Another important function of human PSCs derived neural cells is to treat neural system diseases. One typical example is the cell therapy trials for Parkinson’s disease (PD). Human ESCs could be efficiently differentiated into midbrain dopaminergic neuron progenitors and then transplanted into PD animal’s brain (Kirkeby et al., 2012; Kriks et al., 2011). As for the autologous transplantation, researchers are conducting related studies using non-primate animals, such as Rhesus monkey (Emborg et al., 2013). It should be admitted that there is still a long way to go before the cell therapy could be applied in clinical environment. Scientists are trying their best to optimize the graft cells, either by generating PSCs without transgene integration(Hou et al., 2013; Lu, 2014; Obokata et al., 2014), or by directlyconverting human somatic cells into neural progenitors with non-integration virus (Lu, 2013b; Lu, 2013c; Lu et al., 2013). Reprogramming the in situ somatic cells in the brain may be another potential treatment for neural diseases (Guo et al., 2014; Lu et al., 2014)