Towards stem cell based therapies for Parkinson's disease.

Treating neurodegenerative diseases with cell transplantation has been within reach since the first pioneering clinical trials in which dopamine neuron progenitors from the fetal brain were transplanted to individuals with Parkinson's disease. However, the use of fetal tissue is problematic in terms of low availability and high variability, and it is also associated with ethical concerns that vary between countries. For decades, the field has therefore investigated new scalable source of therapeutic cells from stem cells or via reprogramming. Now it is possible to generate authentic midbrain dopaminergic neurons from pluripotent stem cells and clinical trials using such cells are rapidly approaching.