Parkinson's cure possible in next decade: Expert

Charles Enman
Citizen Special

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Given enough funding, a cure for Parkinson's disease could be in the hands of physicians within 10 years, a noted researcher says.

"It would take money and researchers are in desperate times financially -- but I'm fairly certain we could have a cure within a decade," said Jackalina Van Kampen, who will deliver a lecture on her research Wednesday at the Civic campus of The Ottawa Hospital.

How much money is needed? Ms. Van Kampen doesn't have a precise figure, but says "likely not $100 million, but a few tens of millions of dollars."

That would be good news for the 100,000 Canadians diagnosed with Parkinson's, the degenerative disorder that causes tremors, rigidity and the gradual loss of mobility. The average age of onset is 60, but many are diagnosed earlier, including Canadian-born actor Michael J. Fox, who was only 30 when told he had the disease.

Ms. Van Kampen, a native of Charlottetown, is an assistant professor of neuroscience at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida. Her findings were published in July in a much-noticed article in The Journal of Neuroscience.

Parkinson's is caused by the degeneration of neurons in a structure of the midbrain called the substantia nigra. Those neurons produce dopamine, a neurotransmitter that helps the brain control movement.

By the time Parkinson's is diagnosed, there is already extensive damage of those neurons, damage that physicians and researchers always assumed was irreversible.

Working with rats, Ms. Van Kampen has found ways of coaxing dormant neurons to take on the dopamine-producing role of the damaged neurons and to restore the brain's control of movement.

Scientists have gradually been accepting that many structures in the brain can regenerate themselves. In the hippocampus, which helps create memories, generation of new neurons is part and parcel of the process of memory creation.

"But no one thought regeneration occurred in the substantia nigra," Ms. Van Kampen says. "Five years ago, they called my idea 'completely crazy'."

Throughout the brain, there are undifferentiated cells called progenitor cells that, with the right stimulation, can transform themselves into more specific types of cells. Some of them are in the substantia nigra, and Ms. Van Kampen hoped to find a way to convince those cells to become dopamine neurons. Working with Parkinsonian rats, she found a drug that increased the number of dopamine neurons by 180 per cent.

Sophisticated brain scanning showed that those new dopamine neurons were working well. But the proof of the pudding was the behaviour of the rats: Their movements, which previously showed problems typical of Parkinson's, were now almost fully restored to normal -- what Ms. Van Kampen calls "a functional recovery."

Rats aren't people, and finding the equivalent way of coaxing progenitor cells in human brains to appropriately mutate is not a slam-dunk exercise, but Ms. Van Kampen feels sure the task is doable, given enough funding and perhaps a decade of hard research.

Equally important as generating cells to replace damaged neurons is the protection of neurons that are still intact. Ms. Van Kampen has found that ginseng, that most ancient of healing herbs, is very effective. When she treated rats with ginseng and then administered a toxin that would destroy cells in the substantia nigra, she found on post mortem examination that those cells were "almost completely protected."

Finally, in a finding that will gratify mothers and gym teachers, she's found that exercise reduces the severity of Parkinson's.

She put some Parkinsonian rats, normally housed in shoe box-sized cages, into a much larger, three-level ferret cage that amounted to "a giant rat condo," complete with running wheels and chewing blocks.

"We found that rats in this enriched environment recovered some neurons in the substantia nigra," she says. "And I guess that speaks to the importance of keeping active, for everyone."

She also believes that the work she's doing will have application in treatment of other neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease.

Her main interest, though, is Parkinson's. Her father developed the disease when she was in her early teens. When she was 14, the leader of a church group for girls asked her to write down her dream of her future. "And I wrote that I would cure Parkinson's," she says. "Family history surely set me on a path."