Bioprocessing of human neural stem/progenitor cells for the treatment of Parkinson's disease

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The Research Proposal I am putting forward in this NSERC Discovery Grant Application is very much a discovery project based on the bioprocessing of a type of human brain cell (i.e. adult stem harvested from somatic tissue) that I am now convinced will play a critically important role in a planned international clinical trial on Parkinson's disease. The first part of this clinical trial (i.e. based on stem cell therapy) will treat about 100 patients via transplantation of primary human tissue harvested from the ventral mesencephalon (VM) region of the human brain. The second stage of the clinical trial will use human brain cells produced using the bioreactor technology platform developed in my laboratory at the University of Calgary. The approach is a cell restorative strategy that focuses on restoring lost function by replacing the degenerated dopamine (DA)-producing neurons (DAergic neurons) using a transplantation procedure developed by a neurosurgeon colleague, Dr. Ivar Mendez, for the treatment of Parkinson's disease (PD).