Long-awaited treatments for incurable Parkinson’s Disease (PD) could be on the horizon, with stem cell-based therapies moving rapidly towards human clinical trials.
The international Stem Cell Corporation (ISCO) has recently been granted authorisation to begin phase I/IIa clinical trials on 12 participants with moderate to severe PD.
The participants will be given varying doses of neural stem cells and have their neural activity monitored for a period of 12 months, in order to determine dosage levels for potential stem cell-based treatments.
Roger Barker, PhD, from the John van Geest Centre for Brain Repair at the University of Cambridge, has urged people to “react with caution” in a recent paper published in the Journal of Parkinson’s Disease.
Co-author of the paper and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Parkinson’s Disease, Patrik Brundin, said: “This is an exciting prospect but should only be undertaken when all the necessary pre-clinical data and regulatory approvals have been obtained and verified and the criteria for moving those cells to trials fully resolved and met.
“Acting prematurely has the potential not only to tarnish many years of scientific work, but can threaten to derail and damage this exciting field of regenerative medicine.
“Hopefully, in 2016, we are ready to take a more careful approach as we strive to repair the PD brain with stem cell-based therapies, avoiding many of the mistakes that have dogged this field over the last three decades.”