They found the cells had defective mitochondria, which help produce energy for the cells. They took skin cells from people with Parkinson’s and turned them into the kinds of nerve cell destroyed by the disease. Despite that lack of certainty researchers in Germany may have found a way to treat the disease. We know many of the symptoms – trembling hands and legs, stiff muscles – are triggered by the loss of dopamine producing cells in the brain, but we are not sure what causes those cells to die. Two studies targeting Parkinson’s offer new clues to treating the disease (Kevin McCormack)ĭespite decades of study, Parkinson’s disease remains something of a mystery. Now we can start to answer so many questions.” For decades we’ve had very few clues about the origins of these disorders or how to treat them. We now have a way to directly study the neuronal function of, in principle, hundreds of people with schizophrenia and autism. T cells are very specialized immune cells with a simple round shape, so the rapid transformation is somewhat mind-boggling. “It’s kind of shocking how simple it is to convert T cells into functional neurons in just a few days. In a press release, Wernig explains this unexpected but very welcomed result: The huge advantage with T cells is that they can be isolated from readily available blood samples, both fresh or frozen. The study, funded in part by CIRM, describes a variation on their transdifferentiation method which converts T cells from the immune system, instead of skin cells, into neurons. This week, the Wernig lab reported on a solution to this bottleneck in the journal, PNAS. But these types of genetic analyses require data from many patients and obtaining patient skin samples hampered progress because it’s not only an invasive, somewhat painful procedure but it also takes time and money to prepare the tissue sample for the transdifferentiation method. This breakthrough provided a more efficient path to studying how genetics plays a role in various mental disorders, like autism or schizophrenia, using patient-derived cells. This so-called transdifferentiation technique leapfrogs over the need to first reprogram the skin cells into induced pluripotent stem cells.

Credit: Marius Wernig, Stanford University.īack in 2010, Stanford Professor Marius Wernig and his team devised a method to directly convert skin cells into neurons, a nerve cell. Induced neuronal (iN) cells derived from adult human blood cells.

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