Year 2

A promising approach to alleviating the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease is to transplant healthy dopaminergic neurons into the brains of these patients. Due to the large number of transplant neurons required for each patient and the difficulty in obtaining these neurons from human tissue, the most viable transplantation strategy will utilize not fetal dopaminergic neurons but dopaminergic neurons derived from human stem cell lines. While transplantation has been promising, it has had limited success, in part due to the ability of the new neurons to find their correct targets in the brain. This incorrect targeting may be due to the lack of appropriate growth and guidance cues as well as to inflammation in the brain that occurs in response to transplantation, or to a combination of the two. Cytokines released upon inflammation can affect the ability of the new neurons to connect, and thus ultimately will affect their biological function. In out laboratory we have been examining which guidance molecules are required for proper targeting of dopaminergic neurons during normal development and have identified necessary cues. We have now extended these studies to determine that two of the molecules have dramitc effects on dopaminergic neurons made from human embryonic stem cellls and that at least in vitro, cytokines do not mask these effects. Ultimately, an understanding of how the environment of the transplanted brain influences the ability of the healthy new neurons to connect to their correct targets will lead to genetic, and/or drug-based strategies for optimizing transplantation therapy.