Good to see the MSB share price continue to rise today regardless of the concerted down ramping efforts by some on the weekend .... some non holders from the naysayer cult posting 30+ times a day ... must have been short on the KPI's (pun intended) ... lol
So much going on in the stem cell space .....
https://www.theguardian.com/society...for-parkinsons-will-use-stem-cell-transplantsRadical new therapy for Parkinson’s will use stem cell transplantsEarly next year, a radical new treatment for
Parkinson’s disease involving tissue transplants will receive its first trial with patients – including a group from the UK.
Stem cells grown in the laboratory and transformed into nerve cells will be used to replace those destroyed by the disease. It is hoped that these will stop the spread of debilitating symptoms.
“It has taken a long time to get to this stage but hopefully results from these trials will mean that, in a few years, we might be able to offer tissue transplants as standard treatments for Parkinson’s,” said Prof Roger Barker, of Cambridge University. “It is certainly a promising approach.”
In the UK, about 145,000 people live with Parkinson’s and about 18,000
new cases are diagnosed every year. The disease is triggered when nerve cells that supply dopamine to the brain start to die due to a combination of genetic and environmental factors.
Dopamine helps a person control movement. When supplies drop, the result is shaking, stiffness, depression and other symptoms that can end with patients using a wheelchair or being bed-ridden. The disease’s progress can be slowed by the drug L-dopa, which replaces some of the lost function of dopamine cells. Treatments become less effective over the years. Scientists have been searching for years for new approaches.
One idea has been to replace dying dopamine cells with unaffected versions, which has been tried by several centres across the world. This initially involved using tissue from aborted foetuses that had been donated for medical research.
Foetal tissue contains dopamine-making cells that can supply the missing chemical, although at least six or seven foetuses are needed to provide sufficient material for one patient. In trials in Europe, these cells were injected into patients’ brains with encouraging results. Other trials in the US found such treatments far less effective, however.
The use of tissue from aborted foetuses was opposed by many on religious grounds. It was also hard to source sufficient supplies for widely used treatments. However, Barker and his team at Cambridge – working in collaboration with scientists led by Prof Malin Parmar at Lund University in Sweden – have developed a technology that avoids these problems.
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