International Stem Cell Corp. announced today that behavioral improvements have been observed after six months in their pre-clinical non-human primate (NHP) study of Parkinson’s disease (PD). ISCO is a biotechnology company developing novel stem cell-based therapies and biomedical products and is based in Carlsbad, California. The detailed behavioral data is slated to be presented at the 66th American Academy of Neurology Annual Meeting in Philadelphia.
“It is encouraging to see these behavioral scores trending in the right direction as it means that the implanted cells may be having a positive impact on the disease symptoms,” said Professor D. Eugene Redmond Jr. MD, of Yale University Medical School and the study’s supervisor. “The rating scores are equivalent to components of the UPDRS which is widely used in research to evaluate Parkinson’s patients. The Parkison’s score is known to correlate very highly with brain dopamine concentrations.”
The study, consisting of 18 primates, are exposed to the neurotoxin, MPTP, divided into three cohorts, a sham treated group and two treatment groups receiving different doses of human neural stem cells (hPNSC) derived from ISCO’s proprietary parthenogenetic stem cell line. All groups had matching levels of parkinsonism and functional disability prior to the cell injections. Six months of data showed that the healthy behavior scores of the treatment group increased 170% while the placebo group increased by 58%. In addition, one treatment group showed a major improvement in the main Parkinson’s rating score of 63% (p www.internationalstemcell.com
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