Stem Cells: The New Hope for Parkinson's Disease Treatment

Stem Cells: The New Hope for Parkinson's Disease Treatment

Abdelali Ben Maloui, Bilal El-Mansoury, Youssef Ait Hamdan, Mjid Oukhrib, Hafida El Ghachi, Lahcen Tamegart, Ahmed Draoui, Halima Gamrani
Copyright: © 2023 |Pages: 21
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-6684-5156-4.ch018
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Abstract

Stem cells are defined by their ability of self-renewal and generation of differentiated functional cell types, which are derived from the embryo and various postnatal animal sources. These cells can be divided according to their developmental potential into totipotent, unipotent, multipotent, and pluripotent, which may be of embryonic, fetal, or adult origin. These stem cells are an effective way to explore human diseases and their treatment, especially neurodevelopmental disorders. Therefore, stem cells used for cell therapy in Parkinson's disease (PD) are mainly embryonic stem cells (ES Cells), fetal neural stem cells (NSCs), adult neural stem cells, mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) because of their plasticity, and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). They are theoretically capable of forming dopaminergic neurons that may be implanted in patients with Parkinson's disease. This chapter presents the primordial role of cell therapy by stem cells in the mechanism of Parkinson's disease, also in dopamine cell replacement based on generating neurons.
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Stem Cells

The body is composed of various types of specialized cells that are organized into tissue, blood and organs. All specialized cells originate from populations of non-specialized cells called “stem cells”. Although stem cells do not accomplish specific cellular functions themselves, they have the potential to become mature specialized cell types that perform specific cellular functions in the body (John P., et al., 2009).

A stem cell is therefore an non-specialized cell able to renew itself indefinitely by cell division and to give origin under certain physiological or experimental conditions to several types of differentiated tissues. The division of a stem cell produces a new stem cell (a “reserve” cell) and a cell that acquires a specific morphology and function of the tissue (differentiation). A stem cell does not express any specialization, it is said to be undifferentiated (Alberts B., et al., 2002).

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