Munich

Patrik Brundin: wins US defence funds to study stem cell treatments for Parkinson's disease. Credit: B. LARSSON

The US Department of Defense is giving $240,000 to Lund University, Sweden, in order to fund research into treating Parkinson's disease with human embryonic stem cells.

The unlikely partnership came about after Patrik Brundin, the Swedish project's principal investigator, was advised to submit a proposal to the US Army's Neurotoxin Exposure Treatment Research Program. The recommendation came from the New York-based Michael J. Fox Foundation, which supports research into Parkinson's.

The army's programme supports research into neurological diseases in case neurotoxins are used as weapons of war. It considers grant applications from researchers anywhere in the world, as do many US government research programmes.

Parkinson's disease occurs when dopamine-producing cells degenerate in a brain area called the substantia nigra. Brundin was involved in pioneering studies in the late 1980s that tried to replace those cells using substantia nigra tissue from aborted human embryos.

In the small series of clinical trials in Sweden and the United States, some patients did very well, some less well, some did not respond and a small number suffered the side effect called dyskinesia, where a patient has uncontrolled movement of the head or limbs.

“We do not understand the basis of this inherent variability,” says Brundin, who points out that the supply of embryonic tissue is unreliable and could be one source of variation. Human embryonic stem cells that are stimulated to differentiate into dopamine-producing cells could provide more reliable material for transplantation.

His team will first develop methods of differentiating a stem cell line produced at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. The cell line is one of those approved for federal funding by the US National Institutes of Health. These cells will be transplanted into the brains of rats which have a type of parkinsonism induced by chemical damage. The condition of the rats will be continuously monitored, as will the survival and correct biological functioning of the transplanted cells.

“In this way we hope to get some insight, under very controlled research conditions, into the variability of transplanted tissue in parkinsonism,” Brundin says.