Today in the Wisconsin State Journal an article by the science reporter Ron Seely said that two grants from the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research are going to Waisman stem-cell researchers.
“Clive Svendsen, director of the Waisman Center’s stem-cell research program, will receive $396,000 over two years for his work with nerve cells derived from human fetal brain tissue. The other grant, $451,000 over two years, will go to Su-Chun Zhang and James Thompson, who are trying to grow dopamine neurons–the kind of neurons damaged by Parkinson’s disease–from human embryonic stem cells.”
Clive Svendsen and Su-Chun Zhang are researchers at the Waisman Center. James Thomson is the UW-Madison developmental biologist who was the first in the world to successfully isolate and culture human embryonic stem cells in 1998.