bottom line it's ridiculous that these dinky little companies are doing this cutting edge research and not big pharma but i'm glad someone is doing it.

seems like every gene/cell transplant trial involving surgery except for fetal transplants have had great phase I results and failed in phase II. Along with the strong placebo affect in pd patients willing to participate in these trials, the bungee jumper type personality, i've seen speculation that since they are all open label, and the primary researcher is involved, AND there is money involved, the scoring is sometimes a little biased, data is thrown out, participants washed out.

this includes the AMGEN GDNF infusion trials, titan pharmaceuticals spheramine, neurologix's gaba gene implant, ceregene's neurotrophic genes, then there was the recent oral trial of that small naturally derived product in england that failed phase2.

then there is that OXFORD something or other 3 gene for producing dopamine implant that seems stuck.

as an aside, i participated in a trial of a new agonist called sumanirole, seemed to work quite well, compared it to requip and i initially got requip, dosed up to the right dose, then later stopped requip and dosed up on sumanirole. my symptoms were very mild so hard to compare symptomatic affect but side affects were less in sumanirole, and i heard that it worked better anecdotally in more advanced patients. study was suddenly cancelled as pfizer bought out pharmacia which made sumanirole. from the following posts, seemed like others thought sumanirole worked well and pfizer buried the drug, where's their incentive to develop a better product? they did do a lot if EKG's during the trial.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/opinions/4506/