Parkinson's disease is a debilitating disease that generally affects aged people. Here the nerve cells in the brain that are responsible for controlling muscle movement and co-ordination are badly affected. Consequently Parkinson's patients do not have control over their muscular movements.

A neurotransmitter called dopamine controls muscle movements. However dopamine levels in Parkinson's disease are paltry. In the current study, researchers therapeutically cloned an embryo to harvest stem cells that were eventually converted into dopamine-producing neurons.

This was done by harvesting cells from the tail of the mice and the converting them into stem cells. These cells were then directed to develop into dopaminergic cells - cells that produce dopamine.

Reporting in the online edition of the journal Nature Medicine dated March 23, the researchers said that mice who received stem cells from their own embryos showed marked improvement from symptoms of Parkinson's disease.

However when stem cells were grafted into other mice there was little or no improvement. The researchers said that therapeutic cloning was promising for Parkinson's disease because the animals were not rejecting their own cells, which meant the immune system was intact.

Current therapies for Parkinson's disease are merely symptomatic, meaning they treat just the symptoms. Stem cell therapy is an exciting and innovative area that could provide an answer to diseases like Parkinson's that hurt nerve cells of the brain.