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FDA OKs First Human Trial of Neural Stem Cell Therapy
An anonymous reader sends word that the FDA has approved a phase 1 trial for Neuralstem, a company with a patented stem cell procedure targeting ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) and other spinal conditions. The company's CEO said in a press release, "While this trial aims to primarily establish safety and feasibility data in treating ALS patients, we also hope to be able to measure a slowing down of the ALS degenerative process." Results are expected in 2 years. The trial will involve 12 ALS patients who will receive stem cell injections in the lumbar area of the spinal cord. An information site for the disabled community adds hopefully: "If it makes it through all stages of testing, we will see if doctors are willing to [use] it on subjects that have injuries coming from physical injuries like diving accidents."
Any chance that this could be passed through quick enough to prolong a certain genius' life?
It makes me sad that this is news in 2009. This should really have been commonplace research by now.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Kids eat too much anyway - it'll do them good. How much does a sandwich and an apple cost, anyway? You're not going to fund much research for that.
Ah, does that really matter?
Kid goes to school, then has to spend every cent taking care of a failing parent. Parent dies anyway, kid broke for life.
Kid doesn't go to school, gets a job, puts self thru school, and both parent and kid come out better.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I read TFA and I still don't understand if these are embryonic stem cells or adult stem cells... anyone?
I see you did well at Economic Fallacy School.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I assume you have the same concern about every single medical procedure ever invented?
Wonder how much the treatment will cost? How many kids don't get to eat at school so that someone gets this treatment.
Don't worry, the people who can't afford lunch for their kids will be the same ones who can't afford this treatment. So nothing you would be concerned with.
The enemies of Democracy are
WTF?
That website is horrible and factually wrong.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
A sandwich costs me about $20 to make. When I make it I have to buy new Miracle Whip cause the last one went moldy. That's almost $2. Then I buy a nice loaf of Potato Bread (usually Oroweat); about $4.5. If I don't have mustard, then that's another buck (but truthfully, mustard doesn't go bad any time soon so I usually have some on hand). A couple of roma tomatoes at $0.79/lbs, so figure another buck. A head of lettuce (preferably green leaf or butter) which varies wildly over the year, but say $1.25 for that 'cause it's summer. Then I need some deli style ham and that runs about $4-$5. If I'm making a BLT instead, I'm still paying $4-$5 for a pound of bacon. Since I'm having a sandwich, I need Frito-Lays which are usually around $3. I also need some cottage cheese for another $2.5 and a piece of fruit to slice (which is where your apple comes in) and put on the cottage cheese for another $0.75. Then to put all this down, I need a nice glass of cold milk, so I spend another $1.75 on a quart of whole milk unless I'm feeling particularly good, then I go over to the dairy and buy theirs for $2.50 cause it is way better than I can get at the store.
Well geez, how else do you propose we pay for it? It's not like we can just stop attacking foreign countries and killing thousands of civilians, can we?
The article states that the clinical trials are being conducted on patients with various levels of the disease. It also states that they are hoping to see the degenerative rate of the disease slow due to the treatments. It does not, however, talk about whether or not this stem cell treatment, or a similar one, could be used to treat patients with a developed case of ALS. For instance, to the /.er that talked about saving Hawking's life, Hawking has had the disease long enough that many of his motor neurons have probably already died out. Can this treatment be used to restore or replace said neurons? For those ALS patients that are already severely disabled, treatment needs to go beyond the stage of slowing the disease down. I would love to see ALS patients walking and talking again that couldn't previously.
Neuralstem's own website also seems rather scant in details on therapy for highly developed levels of ALS. Does anyone know of any research being conducted to treat the latter stages of ALS or how relevant this treatment is for those stages?
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
Stem cells have the potential to reproduce exponentially. Give these stem cells to a patient that has a mutation in growth factor production or secretion, like many cancer or precancerous patients, and you have an unmitigated tumor. I do research with growth factors and development. This, in my opinion, is not a good idea.
But those are the problems this research will address. I'll be eager to see the results in two years.
Found step 2!
1. Attack foreign countries ( killing thousands of civilians )
2. Feed children dead civilians
3. Profit!
Soylent Green, it's what's for dinner.
Wonder how much the treatment will cost? How many kids don't get to eat at school so that someone gets this treatment.
Feel free not to have the treatment if you get ALS. You know, For The Children and all.
Except that's not what will happen and you damn well know it. If you're diagnosed with a horrible and deadly disease, you will personally knock a million lunches out of a million hungry, adorable, big-eyed schoolkids' hands, and laugh at them while they cry, if that's what it takes to get you a cure.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
A head of lettuce (preferably green leaf or butter) which varies wildly over the year, but say $1.25 for that 'cause it's summer.
Apparently you didn't get the memo. It's fall now.
There have been several studies involving prayer and healing, with extensive double-blinds.
It only make the person who prays feel better, which is no small thing, but praying for someone else does not promote healing.
In the case of certain sects who believe in prayer instead of medical treatment, it actually promotes death.
You are welcome on my lawn.
When itemizing the cost of one's sandwich, one should subcategories sandwich accompaniments. Said accompaniments, while worthy of note, tend to overestimate sandwich-specific cost.
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
If it was my kids, it would be worse:
"Excuse me. If you're sick, you can have my sandwich if that will make you better."
Imagine it with the 5-year-old lisp.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
we will see if doctors are willing to [use] it on subjects that have injuries coming from physical injuries like diving accidents.
First you have to convince crazy religious idiots, then you have to convince the crazy government idiots, and yet you still have to convince the crazy doctor idiots!? Is there no end to this insanity?!
I am the lawn!
I was going to go through your currently "Insightful" post line-by-line, questioning the need for the pounds of food you require to make a single sandwich, but in the interest of charity I will just assume you are either Dagwood Bumstead, The Flash, The Incredible Hulk, or just morbidly obese. Seriously, though: a loaf of bread, a pound of bacon/ham, a jar of Miracle Whip, a head of lettuce, and a large bag of fritos?! Good thing you snuck in a couple healthy cups of cottage cheese and a piece of fruit to balance it out.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
WTF?
That website is horrible and factually wrong.
What's that you say?! A troll has a link in his sig to a website that is wrong!?! Rally the Internet Justice League - this evil cannot be allowed to stand unopposed!!!
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
Neural Stem Cell Therapy - It Tickles!!! (tee hee .......eyes go glassy .... drool begins)
L'esperienza de questa dolce vita (The experience of this sweet life) - Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
That's a hell of a sandwich if you're using the whole tub of Mayo, a pound of tomatoes, a whole loaf of bread, a pound of bacon, a whole head of lettuce, and alongside it a 10 serving bag of fritos, and then drinking a whole quart of milk? Can I ask what your BMI is?
In reality, it's more like this. You use 1/25th of the tub of mayo, so 1/25 of $2 is really more like 8 cents. Hell, let's say you're generous. 25 cents. We'll assume it's one of the nice loaves of bread that only has like 10 slices. so 1/10th of the $4.50, so .45. Let's assume you use 2 romas (they're kinda small) on the sandwich. In my experience that's at most around a half pound. So we'll round and say .40. 3 leaves of lettuce is about 1/10th of a head if it's a medium sized head of lettuce, so rounding up to .13. We'll go with the bacon since you told us volume there, heck, let's make a bacony BLT. 4 thick slices accounts for .30 pounds I'd wager, so that's $1.35 (most expensive item so far!) A single serving bag of Fritos runs 40 cents after tax (they're those 3 for a dollar bags). We'll assume you eat the whole fruit. Finally, 2 servings of milk (we'll even go with the good dairy one you mentioned) would only be half of the quart, so round that up to 88 cents.
The REAL cost of your sandwich would be $4.61. Give or take.
Now if you bought that sandwich at a sandwich shop, yeah it'd be like 15 bucks. Mmmm, capitalism.
Obviously he should go to the grocery store and only buy the two slices of bread, four strips of bacon, single leaf of lettuce and tablespoon of mayo he needs.
Or maybe, just maybe, the point was that there is a certain minimum amount of purchasing required to make food at home, a minimum that makes the occasional sandwich ridiculously expensive.
If I only eat a sandwich once a week or less, it is much more cost effective to buy one at the deli then try and store perishable goods I won't be using.
http://www.chaotickingdoms.com
No. The problem is that the store doesn't sell bread by the slice (for which I would need 4 slices). The bacon I buy comes in a 1lbs package (about 3 slices per sandwich). The Miracle Whip, like the bread, comes by the container which is way more than I would use (about 1/2-1 tsp). The Fritos, though in a similar boat to the other items, tends to be doled out over days, but I buy it to make the sandwich meal complete (Actual use with meal: 1/4-1/2 cup).
Why it was "insightful", I'm not sure. Although I am being honest in saying it costs me about $20 to make a sandwhich, I was trying to be funny. A sandwich for 1 guy can cost a bit since I make about 2 sandwiches a year. Most of it goes to waste. The bread is moldy after being shoved in the back corner of the cupboard by the time I need it again; the "mayo" will expire on the refrigerator shelf, and the lettuce and left over tomato will wilt in the crisper. If the Fritos are not taken to work, then sadly they will go stale. On the good side, bacon never goes to waste. It will be accompanies on Saturday with some eggs and pancakes (I don't really like toast).
Wonder how much the treatment will cost? How many kids don't get to eat at school so that someone gets this treatment.
This website estimates 700 billion dollars in direct costs, if we figure a school lunch costs somewhere in the neighborhood of 7 dollars (have no idea what the actual average cost would be,) that's about 100 billion lunches I guess. Somewhere in there.
Oh wait a minute, you said treatment, as in the spinal cord repair. I thought for a minute you were talking about the Iraq war, Mr. Center-right conservative. Sorry, my bad.
I have no idea how much the treatment will cost. Pocket change to us, but as I always say, a tax dollar spent on something besides bombing someone is a terrible waste of a dollar.
Can someone who understands statistics and FDA trial phases explain something to me. . . Is a sample size of 12 really big enough to be a reasonable 'safety' trial? Or do they start with a small trial, just to find out if there's any problems so severe that they would affect almost *anyone*, then in future phases, increase the sample sizes to more and more test subjects, looking for those problems that only affect 1/1000 or 1/100000 patients?
There's also the fact that taking care of somebody who is slowly dying of ALS isn't exactly free. Nor(on average) are the lost years of life.
There are certainly medical treatments that will never be viable in economic terms, that are available(or not) basically for ethical/humanitarian reasons. However, cures for diseases that would otherwise involve a number of years of expensive decline and an early death may well not fall into that category. Because R&D is expensive, the per-case cost of the first round is going to be crazy; but volume use could end up being a win in purely financial terms, not to mention the obvious non-monetary benefits of less painful lingering death.
It's always seemed strange to me that an all knowing, all powerful, and just God, won't help a sick person unless somebody else asks Him to.
My uncle had to go to China for a similar treatment - 5 years ago.
Maybe if he could've continued the therapy at home, he'd still be alive today.
...on the other hand he is a definite hypocrite for suggesting that people doing science are wasting their time, when he's pissing around on /. all day.
The religious yahoos are only holding up tax funded embryonic stem cell research...
they will pass just about anything really fast, without reading it or concerned about the outcome.
Do you mean like McDonalds that runs the Ronalds MacDonalds Houses so that the parents of sick children have a place to stay or Eli Lilly that has funded millions of dollars in scholarships? Get a clue.
Doesn't say if they are using embryonic or adult stem cells. I don't approve of cloning and killing then harvesting cloned babies for spare parts. Its doubly wrong, if not then fuck yeah this shit rocks and I can't wait for the outcome!!!
Zero. Children getting free lunches netted my county's school food program more money than the full paid children. A neighboring county that was a bit higher percentage-wise for Free (or Reduced Price) VS Full Paid was able to go to 100% free lunches (i.e. eat the loss for the non-free kids). So the school food program is acceptably compensated to feed low income children.
The grants from the federal budget that helped fund this research (or the background research) didn't change that. Nor is it like a kid will go hungry because their parent can't afford to pay for school lunches (many poor kids only get to eat at school, not at home except during the summer and weekends).
As are you, partisan scum. There's no difference between you.
I don't usually respond to trolls, but the accountant in me is screaming to right your wrongs.
Haven't you ever heard of amortization? Depreciation?
Just because you have to buy a whole new jar of mayo/pound of bacon doesn't mean you get to assess it all against your sandwich.
If a whole jar of mayo is two cups, but you're only using a tablespoon of mayo, then you can only charge 1/32 of the mayo's cost against the sandwich, because you can still use the 31 other Tbsp to make other sandwiches. Ditto for however little bacon you actually use.
And btw, if you literally use a whole pound of bacon in a single sandwich, well, get ready for extraordinary losses, because that's exactly what's coming out of your pocket when that hospital-stay-inducing heart attack comes along.
Remember, you need to use the accrual basis when you're accounting for assets that last beyond current period.
The first US phase 1 trial, yes. The FDA couldn't have approved the first neural stem cell trial because it was conducted in Sweden by Hakan Widner in 1982 http://www.nytimes.com/1992/11/26/us/success-reported-using-fetal-tissue-to-repair-a-brain.html
George Carillo was the first recipient. He was the first and worst of the 'frozen addicts' covered in J William Langston's "The Case of the Frozen Addicts". His and others' poisoning by MPTP contaminated home made fentanyl resulted in Parkinsonism, which was partially reversed by fetal neural cell grafting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPTP
Their misfortune and subsequent treatment contributed to our now extensive understanding of Parkinson's and of the dopamine system, understanding that contributed to the success of Drs Arvid Carlsson, Paul Greengard, and Eric R. Kandel, recipients of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology. It also contributed to the discovery of endogenous MPTP, and that its conversion to MPP+ in neural mitochondria could be blocked in a majority of cases by trimethylnaphthoquinone, an MAO inhibitor found in tobacco.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
This company in particular was formed in 96 and didn't go public until 2006. Throw in the major advances in computing power and only recently wholesale push for this type of tech across the world and I don't think we can lay it at the feet of the fundies.
Remember, under Bush it was only certain "types" of stem cell research that were inhibited. A lot of the success stories from here and elsewhere came from those not restricted in the US to "public funding". Private funding wasn't stopped. However many of these companies only recently emerged into the public markets where they would have access to larger amounts of funds.
If fundies were stopping this stuff, they how come it didn't surface overseas first? In other words, this science is not easy and getting to human trials isn't like a four week waiting period to see if the rabbit dies
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Then you better check out http://whywontgodhealamputees.com/ . It's intellectually unfair picking on religious people (kind of licking pushing around little kids), but I think we have to now days.
> How many kids don't get to eat at school so that someone gets this treatment
I never ate at school (our school did not have stupid lunch programs like USA schools). I would much rather get ALS treatment than lunch at school though.
WTF are you kidding?
Pick up a 50 cent roll from the bakery. Get individual (free) packets of condiments from the deli. Say you need 1/4 of ham (you don't): $1.5. 1 lb of tomatoes and a head of lettuce will just go bad, don't buy them. Maybe get a small side salad from Wendy's for $1.50 and use the lettuce and tomato from that, and eliminate... cottage cheese and fruit (applying these to sandwich cost is ridiculous *sigh*, you give a mouse a cookie...).
$3.50 for a sandwich and salad. You don't need dressing, fatty.
I see you did well at Economic Fallacy School.
You are right. Why don't you Paypal me all of your money, and you can continue on.
This is my sig.
Oh wait a minute, you said treatment, as in the spinal cord repair. I thought for a minute you were talking about the Iraq war, Mr. Center-right conservative. Sorry, my bad.
1) We already spend three times as much per year on keeping old people into expensive medicine than we do the war.
2) Iraq has twenty trillion dollars worth of oil. Had the war gone out ok then gasoline would be fifty cents a gallon and the national savings would be about 300 billion per year, if not more, basically saving enough money to pretty much buy national health insurance, if you wanted to.
This is my sig.
God love Lou Gehrig. Jesus Christ, poor Lou Gehrig. Died of Lou Gehrig's disease. How the hell did he not see that coming?
You know. We used to tell him, Lou, there's a disease with your name all over it, pal!
No, he's not concerned with any medical procedures at all. He's a conservative, so he doesn't go to doctors, he just prays.
Oh shut up, earth worshipper. Earth is a goddess crap was retarded 2000 years ago and its still retarded now.
This is my sig.
I'd do it just to make them cry.
Move to Cuba you horrible piece of shit. We don't need jerks like you attacking productive people who help their neighbors.