Behavioral assessment of the ability of intracerebral embryonic neural tissue grafts to ameliorate the effects of brain damage in marmosets.

The transplantation of neuronal tissue into the brains of patients with Parkinson's disease is already being assessed as an experimental treatment for the symptoms of this disease, and the possibility of using similar graft tissue to ameliorate the symptoms of other neurodegenerative diseases is being considered. In this context, a small number of transplant experiments have been carried out in monkeys with lesions of the central dopamine and cholinergic systems. These experiments make it possible to determine the optimum methods of transplantation in an animal whose brain is structurally more closely related to the human than that of the rat and to assess the behavioral consequences of transplantation on symptoms that either resemble very closely the symptoms seen in patients, or are of a complex cognitive nature and are therefore more difficult to measure in the rat. It is intended that these experiments will contribute to the development of better treatments for the neurodegenerative diseases, either by the use of transplantation as a clinical treatment, or by contributing to a better understanding of the mechanisms that normally maintain neuronal function and that fail in these diseases.