Human Stem Cells Treat Parkinson's Disease in Monkeys

Positive results are being reported from a study performed by Yale, Harvard, the University of Colorado, and the Burnham Institute and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which using human stem cells to treat monkeys with Parkinson's Disease. The research was performed by recreating symptoms of Parkinson's in African green monkeys by "injecting them with a chemical that damages neurons that make dopamine [and] ... then inject[ing] the monkeys' brains with neural stem cells taken from human fetuses that had been miscarried at 13 weeks."

Of the eight monkeys studied, five were injected with human neural stem cells while three received sham injections. All were observed four months before and four months after surgery, and "those injected with human neural stem cells improved progressively for the entire post-treatment period and were significantly different from the monkeys that received sham injections." 21 other monkeys were also studied purely to identify any other biological effects of the treatment, but no tumors or toxic effects were found.