Stem Cells to Treat Brain Injury in Children

BigDukeSix writes "The first stem cell trial with widespread public health implications is set to begin in Houston. From the article: "Trauma is far and away the main cause of death and disability among children, and the main reason children die from trauma is brain injury...The clinical trial is the first to apply stem cells to treat traumatic brain injury. It does not involve embryonic stem cells.""

Comments

More Information:

[TripMaster Monkey]

Some more information on using stem cells from bone marrow to grow neurons can be found here.

As you can see from the date of the above referenced article, the idea of using stem cells derived from bone marrow to treat brain injury has been around for a while, but now that we've finally progressed to human trials, this field is going to get very exciting very fast. This has the potential to completely rewrite the textbooks on brain & nerve trauma...it's a real pity that Christopher Reeve had to leave us before we made these advances.

Re:More Information:

[Red Flayer]

"...it's a real pity that Christopher Reeve [chrisreevehomepage.com] had to leave us before we made these advances."

Why? What makes an actor who played a comic book hero worthy of mention (other than the fact that he championed the cause), instead of the thousands of children who were and are never able to realize their potential?

Re:More Information:

[Slightly Askew]

(other than the fact that he championed the cause)

That is exactly the reason. Do you realize how much money would have poured in for this research if they could have made Superman walk again using stem cells? It's not about the person, it's about their publicity and their power to help the cause. Remember Ryan White? I went to school with the kid and, frankly, he was an ass. However, his celebrity status did more for AIDS research and education than the deaths of 50 unknown kids with AIDS.

Re:More Information:

[PortHaven]

PLEASE....educate yourself on this issue. You are extremely misinformed!

Try reading the article for starters, here is a quote:

The clinical trial is the first to apply stem cells to treat traumatic brain injury. It does not involve embryonic stem cells.

A bit more about stem cell research:

1. There is no ban on stem cell research. Merely, a provision stating that Federal funds will not be used for fetal stem cell research. (Privately funded research is still available.) Furthermore, the government allocated $500 million to stem cell research. Far from a ban to say the least.

2. All successful or promising stem cell development has been achieved using adult & umbilical stem cells. In fact, many experts in the field believe that there is no need what-so-ever to use fetal stem cells. a) that all goals can be achieved from non-fetal stem cells given a bit more time and study b) said additional study will likely take less time than the study necessary to learn how to control and utilize fetal stem cells.

3. Fetal stem cell research has to date had very little success. The most common end result is "tumors". The fetal stem cells are too reactive and uncontrolled. Of the few dozen articles on stem cell success I have read not a single one has been due to fetal stem cells.

4. When people keep ignorantly making statements above they merely show themselves to be poorly misinformed at best and quite a bit more at worse.

- Saj

Not embryionic?

[geoffrobinson]

Well, that's good news. No ethical dilemma.

It would have been nice if the media stressed the promise of non-embrionic stem cells to the public more (there has been some stories), but it is nice to see it now.

Re:Not embryionic?

[thatoneguy_jm]

This is exactly what we need, at this point - if it can be shown just how helpful stem stell research can be, then perhaps people will start to view it not as a thing to be feared, but a thing to be looked into and studied. And, as noted, by not using embryonic cells controversy is avoided. It's a win-win-win situation: the kids get treated, the research is given a better name, and the ultra-conservatives shouldn't be upset about it.

This study is bogus

[LenE]

Stem cells might be a neat buzzword to get funding, but as a parent of a child with serious brain damage, I can tell you that this is more likely a politically motivated stunt to grease the slippery slope of stem cell research, than something that will generate measurable results. After all, nobody wants to hurt brain damaged children.

The reason I'm so cynical is that babies are very resilient, and for the most part they are like stem cell factories on their own. As they grow, they produce new brain and nerve material, which adults cannot do. It is adult disease and injury (and greed) that fuels the stem cell craze, since our adult bodies cannot heal like young children can.

My daughter had a stroke two months before she was born. This stroke wiped out 85% of the left hemisphere of her brain, replacing it with a fluid filled cyst. When she was three months old, she had an operation to add a drainage passage to this cyst, as it was filling with cerebral spinal fluid and had expanded to fill the entire left half of her cranium cavity. This operation cut through parts of her brain, leaving her completely blind.

At nine months of age, the drainage passage had collapsed, and the cyst had enlarged to block all drainage of cerebral spinal fluid from her brain. Her head swelled with a condition know as hydrocephalus, and she almost died. That night, the CAT scans showed that 75% of the volume that should have been occupied by her brain was filled with fluid. She had an emergency operation to install an artificial drainage valve (a shunt). This event was catastrophic, and was like having her "reset" switch activated, she had to re-learn everything.

Now, the good news. She is eighteen months old now, and has recovered remarkably. Her last CAT scan showed that the original cyst had been reduced to only 25% of the left half of her brain, and the right half is completely restored. The original passage that was cut, that caused her blindness, has healed shut. Her vision is steadily improving and she shows signs that she may be functional without the use of a cane someday. Sure, she's a little behind developmentally, but she is showing lots of promise. All of her healing was without the use of any stem cell treatment, because babies are stem cell factories. Her same injuries would have killed an adult, several times over.

-- Len

Benefits of Embryonic Stem Cells

[SeanDuggan]

I don't know this area particularly well, but I am sure that if the use of adult stem cells was in every way a replacement for the use of embryonic cells, then researchers would simply want to use those.

But they do want access to embryonic stem cells, which suggests to me that embryonic stem cells have some useful property that adult stems cells don't.
They have a higher potential benefit in that they may be more able to develop into a larger numbers of types of tissue. Basically, it was initially thought that stem cells from marrow could only be used to generate red blood cells whereas it seemed perfectly evident that infant stem cells could turn into all kinds of tissue given they're what the body starts from. Since then, we've found that adult stem cells can transform into a number of different kinds of tissues. *wry grin* Not that most of these experiments try to actually transdifferentiate the stem cells. If you read into the details of these experiments, most come down to "we inject a bunch of stem cells into part of the body and see if anything happens."

Basically, the whole thing is over potential. The proponents of infant stem cells say that those stem cells may work better and the adult stem cell people are finding ways to use stem cell therapy without the requiring the sacrifice of another human life for a potential benefit.