New Stem Cell Therapy for Parkinson's 💉

I had a senior recently return from this year's BioJapan forum, essentially a bio-industry partnering event, and he shared with us some interesting cases/studies/products being developed. Given that iPSC technology, which won the 2012 Nobel Prize, was first developed in Japan, this was no surprise.

Japan remains at the forefront of regenerative medicine. This year, Japan authorized the world's first two commercial induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-based cell therapies:

One of them is for Parkinson's Disease, where allogeneic iPSC-derived dopaminergic neural progenitor cells are transplanted into the brain to restore dopamine generation.

This comes as a surprise for us who have tinkered with iPSC: 🤔❓

1. They are injecting the progenitor cells, not the final derived product > basically injecting Tomato instead of Ketchup situation

2. It is not personalised therapy > iPSC was always presumed to eventually have great breakthroughs with personalised cells. Thank goodness because the price of ¥55,306,737 is already steep.

💉 Injections to the putamen/striatum, report improvements in motor skills at the end of their 2 year trial. This is also the first clinical trial using iPSC cells confirming that iPS-cell-derived progenitors can survive without forming tumours and produce neurons in the putamen of patients with Parkinson's.

Nevertheless, I'm excited to see what comes next: 🚶 During this 7-year window, Sumitomo Pharma is required to conduct mandatory Phase IV post-marketing surveillance and collect additional safety and efficacy data before full, permanent approval can be considered.