For eight long years, researchers who were trying to develop a stem cell-based therapy for Parkinson’s disease – an incurable movement disorder marked by uncontrollable shaking, body stiffness and difficulty walking – found themselves lost in the proverbial wilderness. In initial studies, rodent stem cells were successfully coaxed to specialize into dopamine-producing nerve cells, the type that are lost in Parkinson’s disease. And further animal studies showed these cells could treat Parkinson’s like symptoms when transplanted into the brain.

Lorenz Studer, MD
Photo Credit: Sloan Kettering

But when identical recipes were used to make human stem cell-derived dopamine nerve cells the same animal experiments didn’t work. By examining the normal developmental biology of dopamine neurons much more closely, Lorenz Studer cracked the case in 2011. Now seven years later, Dr. Studer, director of the Center for Stem Cell Biology at the Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and his team are on the verge of beginning clinical trials to test their Parkinson’s cell therapy in patients

It’s for these bottleneck-busting contributions to the stem cell field that Dr. Studer was awarded the Gladstone Institutes’ 2017 Ogawa-Yamanaka Stem Cell Prize. Now in its third year, the prize was founded by philanthropists Hiro and Betty Ogawa along with  Shinya Yamanaka, Gladstone researcher and director of the Center for iPS Cell Research and Application at Kyoto University, and is meant to inspire and celebrate discoveries that build upon Yamanaka’s Nobel prize winning discovery of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs).

(L to R) Shinya Yamanaka, Andrew Ogawa, Deepak Srivastava present Lorenz Studer the 2017 Ogawa-Yamanaka Stem Cell Prize at Gladstone Institutes. Photo Credit: Todd Dubnicoff/CIRM

Studer was honored at the Gladstone in November and presented the Ogawa-Yamanka Stem Cell Prize Lecture. He was kind enough to sit down with me for a brief video interview (watch it below) a few minutes before he took the stage. He touched upon his Parkinson’s disease research as well as newer work related to hirschsprung disease, a dangerous intestinal disorder often diagnosed at birth that is caused by the loss of nerve cells in the gut. Using human embryonic stem cells and iPSCs derived from hirschsprung patients, Studer’s team has worked out the methods for making the gut nerve cells that are lost in the disease. This accomplishment has allowed his lab to better understand the disease and to make solid progress toward a stem cell-based therapy.

His groundbreaking work has also opened up the gates for other Parkinson’s researchers to make important insights in the field. In fact, CIRM is funding several interesting early stage projects aimed at moving therapy development forward:

• Justin Cooper White from Scaled BioLabs has a early stage Discovery award for the development of a tool to rapidly develop clinical trial-quality dopamine-producing nerve cells
• Jeanne Loring from Scripps Research Institute has a Discovery award to test the functionality and variability of iPSC-derived dopamine neurons from Parkinson’s patients
• Birgitt Schuele from the Parkinson’s Institute has a Discovery award to test out a novel therapy idea that uses CRISPR gene editing to halt the neurodegenerative process in the Parkinson’s brain

We posted the 8-minute video with Dr. Studer today on our official YouTube channel, CIRM TV. You can watch the video here:

And for a more detailed description of Studer’s research, watch Gladstone’s webcast recording of his entire lecture: