A team from the Brain Repair Centre in Cambridge has undertaken a set of transplants in patients with Huntington's disease and are presenting their findings at the 2002 International Congress of the Transplantation Society which is being held in the USA this week.

Their work describes the progress of these initial four patients six months after they received the transplants. Essentially the team shows the procedure to be safe and that the transplants do not make the Huntington's disease worse. As the transplant takes up to a year to make the correct connections it is too soon to comment on any functional benefit, but the patients themselves have reported some positive benefits.

Huntington's disease is an inherited disease in which a specific group of cells is lost. Unfortunately no treatment is available for the condition and patients can die earlier. World-wide about 300 patients with a similiar condition, Parkinson's disease, have been treated with transplants of neurons - now neural transplantation is being tested on patients with Huntington's.

As with most transplantation programmes the number of patients who can receive this treatment is limited by the availability of suitable cells and this is a critical problem in neural transplantation. Researchers at the Brain Repair Centre are looking at alternative cell sources including neural stem cells and cells from other species such as the pig.

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