“Latest Stem Cells News”

The symptoms of multiple sclerosis could be reversed thanks to stem cell transplants from the patient’s own bone marrow, according to a study that will be published in March in Lancet Neurology by researchers from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, who say that stem cell transplants could restore the immune system of patients suffering from the disease, stopping its evolution, and even causing its regression.

Multiple sclerosis is an autoimmune disease characterized by a defective immune system, which attacks the body’s own tissues in the central nervous system, and effects 57 thousand Italians. The disease develops through a process called “demyelinization”, which causes the deterioration of myelin – sheaths composed of fatty acids that cover nerve fibers – slowing or completely stopping the transmission of nerve impulses along the fibers in the brain and the spinal cord.

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Researchers using stem cells must work to make their treatments safer after a 17 year-old boy with a rare genetic disease in 2001 was cured with an embryonic stem cell transplant in Moscow, but then developed benign brain and spinal tumors four years later. According to ‘Plos Medicine’ magazine, Israeli doctors removed cancer from the boy, the tumors developed due to a stem cell treatment that he received.

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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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Complications and unanticipated side-effects that have slowed the progression of stem cell studies from the lab to the clinic could soon change, researchers say.
For a decade, stem cells have tantalized scientists and patients with their promise to regenerate damaged tissues and offer treatments for incurable diseases.

No one hears, however, about the individuals who died due to complications of surgery, said Dr. Hans Keirstead, a Canadian researcher who made a paralyzed rat walk back in 2004 by injecting its spinal cord with cells derived from human embryonic stem cells.
Keirstead’s lab at the University of California-Irvine just received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to conduct the same experiment in 10 people with recent spinal cord injuries.

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President Obama lifted restrictions on funding for human embryonic stem cell research this morning and issued a presidential memorandum aimed at insulating scientific decisions across the federal government from political influence.

Obama took care to emphasize that the order would not “open the door” to allow human cloning, which he said is “dangerous, profoundly wrong and has no place in our society, or any society.” But the president said stem cell research has enormous potential to further understanding and treatment of many devastating diseases and conditions. America, he said, should play a leading role in exploring the stem-cell research frontier.

David Scadden, M.D., co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Insitute, was online Monday, March 9, at 2:30 p.m. ET to discuss what today’s executive order means to the scientific, medical and research communities, and ultimately to the individual…

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Scientists may be growing impatient, but President Obama has been rightly taking his time in addressing a campaign promise to lift the ban on federal funding for research using new lines of stem cells to be taken from human embryos. Even for strong backers of embryonic stem cell research, the decision is no longer as self-evident as it was, because there is markedly diminished need for expanding these cell lines for either patient therapy or basic research. In fact, during the first six weeks of Obama’s term, several events reinforced the notion that embryonic stem cells, once thought to hold the cure for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and diabetes, are obsolete. The most sobering: a report from Israel published in PLoS Medicine in late February that shows embryonic stem cells injected into patients can cause disabling if not deadly tumors.

The report describes a young boy with a fatal neuromuscular disease called ataxia telangiectasia, who was treated with embryonic stem cells. Within four years, he developed headaches and was found to have multiple tumors in his brain and spinal cord that genetically matched the female embryos used in his therapy.

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