Designer's microglia with novel delivery system in neurodegenerative diseases

Neurodegenerative diseases are a group of central nervous system diseases that have a high rate of morbidity and mortality. More disabling than lethal, the pathogenesis of many of these diseases, like Alzheimer's disease (AD), Parkinson's disease (PD), Huntington's disease (HD), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and Multiple sclerosis, (MS) remains to be established. Even after passage of several decades subsequent to their first recognition, these diseases have proven to be notoriously refractory towards drug treatment. Stem cell therapy itself has faced problems like ethical issues with such transplants, difficult and risky implantation routes and immune rejections of the implanted stem cells. Somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) offers a hope to the aforesaid diseases if the cells selected for nuclear donation itself has inherent regenerative and scavenging properties. Here we propose olfactory ensheathing cells (OEC's) as the donor somatic cell that conceivably would attempt regeneration in above mentioned diseases by differentiating into glia, which would have healthy mitochondria and without any fear of immune rejection. Also proposed is a method of delivering these cells after SCNT to the brain by a novel "transcribrial route" through a device that can deliver cells to the brain across the cribriform plate of ethmoid bone.