A couple of researchers from New York want to revolutionize Parkinsee Therapy – with bred brain cells from the laboratory. Now they are growing in the brain of humans for the first time.
© (m) ZEIT ONLINE; James Cavallini/Science Photo Library, Simran Dhanu/Unsplash.com
Some medicine books compare the aging brain with an autumn leaf tree. Because how branches lose their leaves disappear in the course of life and all the more the nerve cells in the case of diseases like Parkinson’s – and the irretrievable. While skin or muscle cells share and heal for a lifetime, nerve cells in the brain hardly regenerate. The neurosurgein Viviane Tabar new York wants to change that.
With her research group at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, she is working to breed nerve cells in the laboratory and to plant them into the brain of people with a Parkinson’s disease. As a hip prosthesis replaces a broken joint, the nerve cells bred in the laboratory are supposed to replace themselves in the brain and replace the neurons based on the disease. “We want to repair the brain with these cells,” says Tabar in an interview with ZEIT ONLINE.
