NIH: Stem Cells Likely to Treat Parkinson's

When celebrities get involved in politics, their fame often obfuscates the matter at hand. Take the Michael J. Fox ad, for instance. He's encouraging people to vote for candidates who favor stem cell research, and says stem cells might one day treat

Parkinson's disease, which he suffers from.

But we keep hearing how stem cell treatments could be a decade or more away. How likely is it that stem cell research might lead to a cure for Parkinson's? According to the NIH (see the sidebar), the disease is at the top of the list of ailments that might benefit from stem cells. (DA = dopamine)

It is thought that PD may be the first disease to be amenable to treatment using stem cell transplantation. Factors that support this notion include the knowledge of the specific cell type (DA neurons) needed to relieve the symptoms of the disease. In addition, several laboratories have been successful in developing methods to induce embryonic stem cells to differentiate into cells with many of the functions of DA neurons.

The frustration among stem cell scientists is that they can't get the money they would typically get from the government for basic research because of President Bush's 2001 policy barring federal funding for research on embryonic stem cell lines produced after that date.