UCI Researchers Consider 2nd Brain-Graft Surgery

In a procedure they said would be a medical first, researchers at the UC Irvine medical school are considering transplanting fetal tissue into the brain of a patient with Huntington’s disease in an attempt to halt the fatal ailment.

Medical school Dean Edward J. Quilligan said Wednesday that such an experimental surgery is at least six months to a year away and would need approval of many university committees, including UCI’s Human Subjects Protection Committee and the campus Ethics Committee.

“I think it has a lot of steps to go through before we actually do it,” Quilligan stressed. Also, the medical school will proceed cautiously with such a fetal-tissue transplant because after UCI’s most recent experimental surgery, a Dec. 18 brain graft on a woman with Parkinson’s disease, another degenerative brain ailment, the patient died.

UCI officials said they were unaware of a September operation in Mexico City, reported Wednesday, in which fetal tissue was transplanted into the brain of a man with Parkinson’s disease.

UCI researchers have no plans to perform such a transplant on a Parkinson’s patient, but the neurosurgeon who performed the UCI brain graft, Dr. Leslie Cahan, recently asked Quilligan about performing a fetal transplant on a patient with Huntington’s disease.

Cahan could not be reached for comment late Wednesday, but Dr. Ronald F. Young, chief of UCI’s division of neurosurgery, explained that UCI researchers would prefer to use a Huntington’s patient for a fetal-tissue transplant because Huntington’s victims are usually younger and healthier than those who suffer from Parkinson’s.

Parkinson’s disease, which causes rigidity of movements and can cause dementia, generally strikes patients in their 50s and 60s, many of whom have other illnesses, Young said, whereas Huntington’s, which causes muscle twitching and dementia, affects people in their 20s and 30s.

Researchers are hoping that by transplanting fetal tissue into the brain of a Huntington’s patient, those cells would stimulate production of acetylcholine, a neurotransmitting chemical that Huntington’s victims lack, and the operation might “arrest the whole process” of the disease, Young said.

In the brain-graft surgery on a Parkinson’s patient, surgeons removed tissue from an adrenal gland and injected those cells into the brain, hoping that they would stimulate her brain to produce dopamine, a neurotransmitter she lacked. But she died before they could tell if the surgery had worked.