Quote:
Originally Posted by sim00
..."This is the first time that human dopamine neurons have ever been generated from Parkinson's disease patients with parkin mutations," says Jian Feng, PhD, professor of physiology and biophysics in the UB School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences and the study's lead author...
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0207121812.htm
..."This new technology was a game-changer for Parkinson's disease and for other neurological diseases," says Feng. "It finally allowed us to obtain the material we needed to study this disease."...
...One type of Parkinson's Disease brain cell created in lab...
Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/319278
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this seems very impt for those with the parkin gene mutation:
excerpt:
"Once parkin is mutated, it can no longer precisely control the action of dopamine, which supports the neural computation required for our movement," says Feng.
The UB team also found that parkin mutations prevent it from tightly controlling the production of monoamine oxidase (MAO), which catalyzes dopamine oxidation.
"Normally, parkin makes sure that MAO, which can be toxic, is expressed at a very low level so that dopamine oxidation is under control," Feng explains. "But we found that when parkin is mutated, that regulation is gone, so MAO is expressed at a much higher level. The nerve cells from our Parkinson's patients had much higher levels of MAO expression than those from our controls. We suggest in our study that it might be possible to design a new class of drugs that would dial down the expression level of MAO."