Developing neural stem cell-based treatments for neurodegenerative diseases

Owing to the aging of the population, our society now faces an impending wave of age-related neurodegenerative pathologies, the most significant of which is Alzheimer’s disease. Currently, no effective therapies for Alzheimer’s disease have been developed. However, recent advances in the fields of neural stem cells and human induced pluripotent stem cells now provide us with the first real hope for a cure. The recent discovery by Blurton-Jones and colleagues that neural stem cells can effectively deliver disease-modifying therapeutic proteins throughout the brains of our best rodent models of Alzheimer’s disease, combined with recent advances in human nuclear reprogramming, stem cell research, and highly customized genetic engineering, may represent a potentially revolutionary personalized cellular therapeutic approach capable of effectively curing, ameliorating, and/or slowing the progression of Alzheimer’s disease.