Studer, Lorenz P.

PROFESSOR LORENZ P. Studer is the director of the Laboratory of Stem Cell and Tumor Biology at the Memorial Sloan—Kettering Cancer Center in New York. He gained international renown for his conversion of embryonic cells into brain cells, making Studer a pioneer in fetal tissue research. He has also been involved in the first fetal transplants for Parkinson's disease, and in his continued research into stem cells, he is working on the potential for neuroregeneration. He has a research laboratory working in the field of developmental biology, focusing on embryonic stem cell research. In this field, Studer has worked heavily on nuclear transfer and parthenogenetic stem cells, using the techniques of nuclear reprogramming and also studying parthenogenesis—especially through research into using the results from the derivation and differentiation of parthenogenetic stem cells from an adult monkey.

Originally from Switzerland, Lorenz Studer graduated from medical school in 1991, and he completed his doctorate in neuroscience at the University of Bern in 1994. During his time in Bern, he initiated work with Christian Spenger, which led to the first clinical trial of fetal tissue transplantation for Parkinson's disease in Switzerland. Moving to the United States, he next worked at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, in the laboratory of Ronald D. McKay.

It was while he was there that he became a pioneer for techniques that allowed the generation of [Page 538]dopamine cells in culture from dividing precursor cells. Throughout his career, Studer has published extensively on all aspects of his research. While working at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, National Institutes of Health, his first major work in the field was as lead author of “Transplantation of Expanded Mesencephalic Precursors Leads to Recovery in Parkinsonian Rats,” which was coauthored with Viviane Tabar from the Division of Neurosurgery at the University of Massachusetts, Worcester, and Ron D. McKay, also at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, and was published in Nature Neuroscience in August 1998.

It demonstrated that dopamine cells generated in culture could, after transplantation, improve clinical symptoms from rats suffering from Parkinson's disease. This helped to chart a process for the development of new therapies that could be used to treat people suffering from Parkinson's disease. In this work, Studer was supported by a grant from the Swiss Foundation for Biomédical Grants. It led to further experiments that have shown that virtually unlimited numbers of cultured mouse dopamine cells could be obtained from embryonic stem cells.

Subsequently, Studer has tried to focus a part of his research team on brain development and on the possibility of being able to transplant stem cell—derived neural cells to achieve a clinical benefit for people suffering from Parkinson's disease and other debilitating motoneuron conditions. He highlighted the major problem as being that when a patient seeks help, some 80 percent of that person's affected cells have already died, and it is often too late to replace them all. Part of this delay comes from patients feeling that there is no cure and waiting long periods of time before diagnosis. The hope engendered by the research on stem cells has, however, persuaded many people that there is the possibility of treating the condition and of ameliorating its adverse effects in the future. As well as treatment, Studer is keen to use stem cells as a genetic screen or to help with the study of development in real time, and he has been critical of political restrictions placed on the use of embryonic stem cells.

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