ABSTRACT
This chapter is supposed to focus on potential stem cell therapies for Parkinson’s disease (PD). Since there have been only a few such encouraging stem cell studies in animal models of the disease, the preclinical studies are likewise short in number, and furthermore there is perhaps only one human PD patient transplanted to date with human stem or progenitor cells, this chapter will instead concentrate on the new eld of regenerative medicine as a target for stem cell biology to help translate new approaches for both protecting and replacing the compromised dopaminergic nigrostriatal pathway. It should be dened from the outset that a stem cell is a self-renewing cell that can give rise to progeny of different lineages, be able to survive and keep its self-renewing ability following serial transplantation, and respond to injury or disease with repopulating prowess. A progenitor cell is a more committed cell that can give rise to more differentiated cells, for example, neurons or glia, and with limited or no self-renewal capacity. The term “stem/progenitor cell” is used where the degree of stemness of the cell in question has not been resolved (see [1] for details).
