Claire Henchcliffe, MD, DPhil: Dopaminergic Cell Replenishment in Parkinson Disease

“Although we have very good treatments for people’s motor symptoms, even some good treatments for the nonmoter symptoms, there’s still a long way to go.”

The vast majority of motor symptoms that patients with Parkinson disease experience are the result of a lack of dopamine inputs into the striatum. This is why the mainstays of treatment, such as levodopa, work to replace this lack.

However, even when the medications are working properly, over a period of time these medications wear off, and patients will develop dyskinesias, which truly limits the impact these otherwise efficacious therapies can have.

Claire Henchcliffe, MD, DPhil, an associate professor of neurology and neuroscience at Weill Cornell Medicine, along with many others, believes that because the loss of this particular cell type appears to be geographically limited to one area of the brain, that these cells could be replenished with either autologous cells or allogeneic cells.

At the American Neurological Association’s 143rd annual meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, Henchcliffe sat with NeurologyLive to discuss this work, and what she and her colleagues believe could be addressed by a successful effort.