“Latest Stem Cells News”

What is a neural stem cell? How can they help treat neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, spinal cord injury, stroke, ALS (Lou Gehrig‘s Disease)? Evan Snyder of the Burnham Institute helps define neural stem cells (NSC), explaining that they are relatively inaccessible in the adult patient, but that they seem to benefit from some immunotolerance.

It follows that we may be able to use readily available lines of embryonic stem cells for therapy in neurodegenerative disease. Evan reviews current clinical applications for neural stem cells (including as a vehicle for small molecule delivery), and gives his future outlook for neural stem cells. Evan forsees NSCs being used in anti-inflammatory and neuroprotective functions, to deliver tumor killing genes, and to build iPS drug discovery models.

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39-year-old Ted Harada was diagnosed with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig‘s disease. It’s one of the worst diagnoses anyone could get.
He and his doctors expected his health to have severely declined by now. But thanks to an experimental stem cell treatment, he has tossed his cane and is once again playing in the pool with his three kids (…)

Then his neurologist told him about an experiment at Emory University that was recruiting ALS patients to test a stem cell treatment.
The surgeons told Harada that injecting the stem cells into his spine likely would not help him personally, and might even cause harm. But the study would hopefully help scientists find an effective treatment in the future. Harada had nothing to lose and expected nothing – he became study subject number 11 and underwent surgery on March 9 (…)

The Emory surgeons injected 1 million neural stem cells into 10 locations in Harada’s spine (earlier patients received fewer cells; the dosage was gradually increased as the trial progressed). All of the cells came from a single voluntarily aborted and donated two-month-old fetus. Using technology developed by Neuralstem, scientists multiplied the cells and created enough of them to treat all of the patients in this trial and beyond.

“We took one small part of the spinal cord and isolated one million stem cells which are now going to, we hope, treat millions of people around the world,” Dr. Karl Johe, chief scientific officer at Neuralstem told me.

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A revolutionary stem cell procedure may be able to stop ALS, or Lou Gehrig‘s disease, in its tracks.

HealthFirst reporter Leslie Toldo shares the story of one of the few people who have had it done.
ALS is a deadly disease, with a quick and devastating decline. This could be the hope thousands of people have been waiting for.

Fifty-five-year-old Tom Elliott is not a quitter. He has ALS and fights to keep up with the daily routines of his life, even as the disease makes everything harder. “Brushing the teeth has become a real chore. Turning and rolling in bed to get comfortable has become an impossibility. This disease is about having to give up and sacrifice a lot.”

As ALS progresses, it destroys the nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord that control muscle movement until people “cease to be able to move, they become essentially locked in their bodies,” Dr. Nicholas Boulis said.

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A recent scientific follow-up study of patients who underwent autologous stem cell therapy for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig‘s disease, has proved the effectiveness of the therapy. Returning Hope, in Thailand, is one of the first Asian health care providers to arrange for this type of stem cell treatment.
The follow up study was conducted by a team from Akay Hospital, GATA, the University of Marmara, and the Sila Neurorehabilitation Center. It followed 13 patients for one year after stem cell treatment for ALS.

Participants in the study had the following outcomes:

• Nine of thirteen participants had significant improvement, proven by electroneuromyography.
• Three patients died from conditions unrelated to ALS, including lung infection and myocardial infarction
• One patient’s condition was stable, with no improvement or decline

Previous treatments for ALS included growth hormone therapy, which was recently proven ineffective.

Brian Dardzinski, Returning Hope’s CEO, believes the study’s results were inevitable. “We have been partnering with treatment facilities to provide stem cell therapy for ALS for some time now. Our patients have had substantial improvement”.

“It was only a matter of time before a widely publicized study proving our results became available. But we are very pleased that more patients may have the opportunity to undergo stem cell therapy for ALS, due to the new study”, Mr Dardzinski continued.

ALS is one of the most common neuromuscular diseases world wide. Prominent sufferers like Stephen Hawking, guitarist Jason Becker and baseballer Lou Gehrig brought the disease to prominence.

About Returning Hope
Returning Hope is an online portal and facilitator, providing information and assistance to patients looking for adult stem cell treatment. Most of the procedures that Returning Hope facilitates involve autologous transplants – stem cells are harvested from a patient’s own fat in a quick, simple bedside procedure and re-implanted. Autologous adult stem cell therapy can give hope to patients who were previously told their conditions were untreatable, including stroke, autism, ALS, diabetes, cerebral palsy, Parkinson’s and multiple sclerosis.

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New hope in treating Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) or Lou Gehrig’s Disease, an incurable neurological disease, which is particularly frequent in former soccer players, may come from stem cells. Nicholas Maragakis and his colleagues from the Johns Hopkins University of Medicine in Baltimore in the United States, have successfully conducted an important experiment in mice. In a study published in the online edition of ‘Nature Neuroscience’, the American researchers transplanted precursor cells called astrocytes, which function as support cells for neurons, into the mice with ALS. This allow the mice to survive for much longer.

ALS, pointed out the authors, is caused by the degeneration and death of so-called motor neurons, which are nervous cells that send signals to muscles to move. Recent research has demonstrated that astrocytes, belonging to the family of glial support cells, could be struck by the disease. Based on this concept, Maragakis’ team tried to treat an animal with ALS by transplanting early astrocytes.

The cells managed to survive in the spinal cord and the mice, although they did not heal completely, were able to survive much longer than normal. The beneficial effects, specified the scientists, require the presence of a particular transport protein in the precursor astrocytes: a scavenger protein able to remove excess glutamated neurotransmitters, a substance that is involved in the development of ALS, from motor neurons tied to astrocytes.

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