Application of Patient-Specific Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells Produced by Somatic Cells Reprogramming for Treatment of Neurodegenerative Diseases

Neurodegenerative diseases, depending on the cause and condition of disease, destroy neuronal and glial cells at different regions of the brain and the spinal cord. Due to unknown pathogenesis of these diseases, definite treatment is still not available. Furthermore, there is no reliable patient-specific model for experimental and clinical investigations. Despite emerging of new therapeutic methods such as embryonic and adult stem cell therapies in last decades, difficulty of maintaining embryonic stem cells for a long duration, aggressive process of adult stem cells extraction as well as difficulties to differentiation to all variety of cell lines, limited the usage of these techniques for treatment of the patients.
Novel method of induced Pluripotent Stem (iPS) cells production by somatic cells reprogramming may be useful for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases. The investigators succeed to produce reliable patient-specific iPS cells models for some neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and Parkinson disease.