[soccertese]

involved in some of the 1st fetal brain transplants in 1990's ?
http://www.journalofparkinsonsdiseas...ts_Corner.html

The first of the operations took place in Lund in November 1987. Surgeon Stig Rehncrona prepared “Patient One,” a 47-year old woman, for surgery. Patient One had contracted Parkinson’s aged 33 and could now move for only a few hours each day. Rehncrona used a technique called stereotactic surgery, which involved screwing a giant frame onto the patient’s head. He then set the coordinates on the frame to target a precise brain region. Using the precision frame and manual calculations (in the pre-laptop era), he could reach any target in the brain through a single small hole in the skull.


Patrik Brundin sat in another room peering through a microscope and dissecting the fetal tissue. It was a tricky procedure. An 8-week old fetus is about the size of a fingernail. Brundin was only interested in the fetus’ substantia nigra—a structure marginally larger than the head of a pin. His task was to dissect those cells whose destiny was to make dopamine. After two hours of painstaking work, Brundin delivered the immature dopamine nerve cells from four fetuses to Rehncrona who carefully transplanted them into Patient One’s striatum.


Over the next 12 years, 18 fetal tissue cases were done at Lund and more than three hundred worldwide. While, some patients got little benefit, there were some striking successes. For example, Patient Number Four from Lund was grafted only on one side, and in 1999, a PET scan of that side showed that the brain region was producing normal levels of dopamine. Remarkably, the patient was off all medication and his condition reversed "by about ten years" so that he could return to an independent life. Further evidence of transplant success came when two patients grafted in the USA died of causes unrelated to surgery. Their brain tissue was sent to Rush University neuroscientist Jeff Kordower in Chicago. Kordower confirmed there was no doubt the transplants had worked. “The grafts,” Kordower said, “ were huge, tremendous enervation, synapse formation, metabolic enhancement, and so from an anatomical point of view, everything we hoped to find we found.” Despite the promising initial results in open label studies, however, two negative US double blind sham surgery trials (in 2001 and 2003) brought the field to a virtual standstill.