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Australian Scientists Near Breakthrough Cure For Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s MELBOURNE, Australia (AFP) - A cure for degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's may only be four years away due to a revolutionary breakthrough in growing nerve cells, a research team here claimed earlier this week. The team at Melbourne's Monash University Institute of Reproduction and Development has developed a technique to cultivate embryonic stem cells, paving the way for treatment of neuronal diseases and the effects of strokes. Professor Alan Trounson said the discovery had enormous potential. "The challenge is to be able to produce them in a pure form, in a committed state and then find out whether they're going to be useful in the long term for transplantation. And in the case of nerve cells, they could be used in Parkinson's disease, in stroke victims who have a lot of nerve damage in the brain and maybe in Alzheimer's disease," he said. Embryonic stem cells are the foundation upon which other cells grow. Produced from human embryos, restrictions on their use in Australia saw the test cells produced at the University of Singapore and the Hadassah Medical Center. The Monash team is the first to show that cells can be grown into specific types of body cells in a laboratory. But a cure for degenerative diseases was still three to five years away, Trounson warned, due to needed human tests. "We need to do a lot of animal studies to prove the safety and the efficacy of these transplantations," he said. "But if they are as they seem, and if it does follow the route of some of the animal studies done with animal cells, we think they have tremendous prospects for transplantation."
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