Transplantation of Human Fetal Dopamine Cells for Parkinson's Disease

Dopamine Cell Transplantation for Parkinson's Disease: The Importance of Controlled Clinical Trials

“…Unilateral transplantation of fetal tissue was used in the first human clinical Parkinson's disease transplant trials [3,4,38]. Typically implants were made into the side of brain contralateral to the side of the body with the worse Parkinson's symptoms.…”

“…Within 5 months, it was obvious that the unilateral transplant had improved motor performance only contralateral to the side of transplant [3]. Therefore, beginning with our third subject, we have performed bilateral, simultaneous implantation of fetal dopamine neurons into the putamen.…”

“…Beginning with our first human transplant in 1988, we took the position that immunosuppression may not be necessary [3]. Because transplants of fetal dopamine neurons offer the potential for only symptomatic relief of the of Parkinson's disease symptoms, and because immunosuppression is expensive and carries substantial long-term medical risks, we decided not to immunosuppress our first subject [3]. After that we used immunosuppression in 6 of our first 12 transplant patients and found that immunosuppression did not improve transplant outcome [5].…”

“…Dyskinesias have appeared in transplant recipients who had L-DOPA-induced dyskinesias prior to transplant [3,5,7,9,[48][49][50][51][52]. In nearly all patients who have responded to transplants, there is an initial period of increased dyskinesias, which resolves as drug doses are reduced.…”

“…For human transplantation, the equivalent stage of embryonic development is 6 to 8 weeks after conception [3][4][5]. All successful allografts of human embryonic tissue into patients with Parkinson's disease have come from tissue in this developmental window.…”