ISSCR News

New Podcast Episode. Parkinson’s Disease, Cell Therapy, and Exercise
The potential of pluripotent stem cells and the ability to scale and differentiate them to generate large numbers of enriched cell populations has created new opportunities and approaches to treat human disease. Preclinical proof-of-principle data demonstrates that stem cell-derived neural grafts can be used to reverse symptoms of multiple neurological conditions, including Parkinson’s Disease. Cell grafts enriched with dopaminergic neurons, can structurally and functionally integrate in the brain of Parkinson’s Disease models to reverse motor deficits, a finding which has launched several clinical trials. While the results in animal models is essential proof-of-concept, the survival and integration of these cells is suboptimal compared to treatments from fetal-derived ventral midbrain grafts. An area of preclinical and clinical research showing promise in influencing neuronal survival and plasticity is exercise. The benefits of exercise on neural function and disease progression have been widely reported and they have also been shown to enhance the survival and integration of transplanted cells in models of some neurological diseases. However, there is limited data on the benefit of exercise on the functional outcomes of neural grafts in Parkinson’s Disease models. The guests on today’s program will discuss their recent study looking at the effect of exercise on cellular engraftment and functional recovery in animal models of Parkinson’s Disease and the implications for clinical outcomes.

Member Spotlight: Jian Shu, PhD
Decoding the biological "languages" underlying genetic and cellular states remains a major challenge — we aim to build a "Google Translate" to translate and predict different languages in biology.

Exercise Enhances Stem Cell Transplant Function in Parkinson’s Disease
A research team led by Clare Parish from The Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health (in Melbourne) and Lachlan Thompson from the University of Sydney, Australia has now tested whether exercise enhances transplant function in PD rats. In their study, rats received a stem cell-derived transplant to replace lost dopaminergic neurons and some of the rats were given free access to a running wheel. Their work was recently published in Stem Cell Reports.

New Clues to Boosting Liver Regeneration After Acetaminophen Injury
Tomomi Aoyagi and colleagues from Kyushu University, Japan, studied the behavior of single cells in the mouse liver after acetaminophen injury and noticed that regeneration likely originated from a specific type of cell. The work was recently published in Stem Cell Reports.

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