The stem cells as a potential treatment for neurodegeneration

Cell degeneration and death, be it extensive and widespread, such as in metabolic disorders, or focal and selective like in Parkinson’s disease (PD), is the underlying feature of many neurological diseases. Thus, the replacement of cells lost by injury or disease has become a central tenet in strategies aiming at the development of novel therapeutic approaches for neurodegenerative disorders. In addition to the in vivo recruitment of endogenous cells – which is now emerging as a promising novel strategy – transplantation of new, exogenously generated brain cells, is probably the most extensively studied methodology for cell replacement in the central nervous system, with the initial experimental clinical studies in PD dating back to the early seventies (1, 2)). The need to generate the cells to be transplanted in large quantities and in a reproducible, steady and safe fashion, has long represented one of the major issues in this field, regardless of whether one was trying to produce specific cell subtypes or uncommitted and highly plastic neural precursors, which would respond to local, instructive cues, upon transplantation into the damaged area. Neural stem cells, with their capacity for long-term expansion in vitro and their extensive functional stability and plasticity, allow now for the establishment of cultures of mature neural cells as well as highly undifferentiated precursors and are emerging as one of the most amenable cell sources for neural transplantation (3, 4). This book chapter illustrates the basic aspect of the handling and preparation of neural stem cells for experimental transplantation in two animal models of neurodegenerative disorders, namely post-contusion spinal cord injury and multiple sclerosis.