Harvard research gives new model to create Parkinson’s disease in a petri dish using stem cells

This new model is expected to speed up treatment for Parkinson’s and also could result in personalized models to diagnose and treat this disease.

Image source: National Network of Depression Centres

Researchers at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital have come up with a new model that allows to rapidly create Parkinson’s disease in a petri dish using stem cells. This can lead to new personalized methods of diagnosis and treatment.

Senior author Vikram Khurana, chief of the Movement Disorders Division at BWH and principal investigator within the Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases at BWH said “We sought to assess how quickly we could make human brain cells in the lab that give us a window into key processes occurring in the brains of patients with Parkinson’s disease and related disorders like multiple system atrophy and Lewy body dementia."

“And, unlike previous models, we wanted to do this in a short enough timeframe for these models to be useful for high-throughput genetic and drug screens and easy enough for many labs to use across academia and industry," added Vikram Khurana.

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Parkinson’s disease is a degenerative brain condition and is progressive in nature. The patients often struggle with tremors, speech impairment, slowed movement and other health complications. Similar to other neurodegenerative conditions, it also causes protein build-up in neurons which leads to impaired cell function and protein misfolding. The current available treatments work on symptoms but not on the root cause of the protein misfolding.

Khurana added, “The problem is that the way protein clusters form in PD looks different in different patients, and even in different brain cells of the same patient. This begs the question: How do we model this complexity in the dish? And how do we do it fast enough for it to be practical for diagnostics and drug discovery?”

co-first author Alain Ndayisaba said, “In one key application, we are utilizing this technology to identify candidate radiotracer molecules to help us visualize alpha-synuclein aggregation pathologies in the brains of living patients we see in the clinic."

Co-first author Isabel Lam said, “This technology will pave the way for rapidly developing ‘personalized stem cell models’ from individual patients. These models are already being used to efficiently test new diagnostic and treatment strategies ‘in a dish’ before jumping into clinical trials so we target the right drug to the right patient."

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