DA neurons that were first generated from mouse iPSCs in 2008 and transplanted into the striatum of a rat PD model, have shown to ameliorate functional deficits (Wernig et al., 2008). Recently, human fibroblasts have also been used to produce PD patient iPS-cell derived DA neurons. Soldner et al. (2009) was the first to report efficient reprogramming of human skin fibroblasts from 5 patients with sporadic PD into hiPSCs, and subsequent differentiation of these cells into DA neurons. Neural differentiation was first induced by embryoid body (EB) formation method in EB medium on non-adherent culture plates for 8 days, and then neural precursor cells were selected and cultured in ITS medium containing fibronectin, growth factors FGF2, FGF8, and sonic hedgehog (SHH). This was followed by withdrawal of growth factors for 8 days to attain terminal differentiation. Cells produced stained positive for tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) and neuron-specific class III-β-tubulin (TUJ1) confirming their DA neural nature (Soldner et al., 2009). Besides, the obtained hiPSCs, using the Cre-Recombinase excisable viruses, uniformly expressed the pluripotency markers Tra-1-60, SSEA4, OCT4, SOX2, and NANOG, in addition
