Engineering Therapeutic Neural Stem Cell Lines for Parkinson’s Disease

Abstract

The isolation of tissue-specific self-renewable stem cells from human embryonic or adult stem cells is one of the most promising applications for regenerative medicine. Ongoing research suggests that multipotent stem cells are a viable source of specialized cells for tissue repair. Undifferentiated stem cells are better suited when multiple cell types are lost to injury or disease. However, when a single lineage species is associated with an injury or disease, multipotent stem cells can be instructed to terminally differentiate into specific cell types. The terminal differentiation is induced by culturing the multipotent stem cells in media containing specific instructive molecules or by over-expressing lineage-specific gene(s). Further studies are needed to generate cellular phenotypes with stable expression in vitro and after grafting into diseased or injured tissue. Harnessing mechanisms governing tissue histogenesis that take place during early embryogenesis is a promising strategy for engineering specific cell types or tissues. Likewise, the same developmental pathways could also be induced in vitro using a set of instructive cues different from those normally involved during embryonic development. Within the framework of developing therapeutic products, this chapter will discuss the cellular and molecular control of neural stem cell derivation from adult and pluripotent stem cells and their differentiation into dopaminergic lineage.