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Your encouragement and constant feedback on how to improve our offering have only made our resolve and commitment to these ideals stronger. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)īusiness Standard has always strived hard to provide up-to-date information and commentary on developments that are of interest to you and have wider political and economic implications for the country and the world. In the US, scientists from Duke University said in January they had managed for the first time to grow functioning human muscle from iPS cells in the lab. Osaka University is also planning a clinical test to treat heart failure by using a heart muscle cell sheet created from iPS cells. In 2014, Riken, a Japanese government-backed research institution, carried out the world's first surgery to implant iPS cells to treat a patient with age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a common medical condition that can lead to blindness in older people. The cells can be transformed into a range of different types of cells, and their use is a key sector of medical research. These can be derived from the patient, making them less likely to be rejected, while also sidestepping ethical qualms about taking cells from embryos. IPS cells are created by stimulating mature, already specialised, cells back into a juvenile state - basically cloning without the need for an embryo. They also confirmed that the iPS cells had not transformed into tumors during the two years after the implant.
Researchers announced last year that primates with Parkinson's symptoms regained significant mobility after iPS cells were inserted into their brains.
The human trial comes after an earlier trial involving monkeys. The university will monitor the conditions of the patients for two years after the operation. The clinical test with seven participants aged between 50 and 69 will begin on Wednesday. Worldwide, about 10 million people have the illness, according to the Parkinson's Disease Foundation.Ĭurrently available therapies "improve symptoms without slowing or halting the disease progression," the foundation says.īut the new research aims to actively reverse the disease. Parkinson's disease is a chronic, degenerative neurological disorder that affects the body's motor system, often causing shaking and other difficulties in movement. The iPS cells from healthy donors will be developed into dopamine-producing brain cells, which are no longer present in people with Parkinson's disease. The research team at Kyoto University plans to inject five million induced Pluripotent Stem (iPS) cells - which have the potential to develop into any cell in the body - into patient brains, the university said in a press release. Japanese researchers today announced the first human trial using a kind of stem cell to treat Parkinson's disease, building on earlier animal trials.