Cell therapy for Parkinson's disease: have the glory days gone?

摘要

Over the past 25 years, cell therapy has been assessed in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD), with the aim of restoring lost dopaminergic function. Fetal ventral midbrain cells have been successfully grafted into the neostriatum of rodents with experimental PD and have yielded promising results in open-label trials in human beings. The use of sham surgery as a control has been deemed unethical and unnecessary by many researchers;2 however, despite this scepticism, results of randomised, sham-surgery-controlled trials have enabled balanced analysis of the safety and efficacy of this treatment. Such studies have revealed the occurrence of graft-induced dyskinesias,