Wheelchair-Bound Stroke Victim Walks Again After 'Unprecedented' Stem Cell Trial At Stanford (washingtonpost.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Washington Post: Stanford researchers studying the effect of stem cells injected directly into the brains of stroke patients said Thursday that they were "stunned" by the extent to which the experimental treatment restored motor function in some of the patients. The results, published in the journal Stroke, could have implications for our understanding of an array of disorders including traumatic brain injury, spinal cord injury and Alzheimer's if confirmed in larger-scale testing. The work involved patients who had passed the critical six-month mark when recoveries generally plateau and there are rarely further improvements. Each participant in the study had suffered a stroke beneath the brain's outermost layer and had significant impairments in moving their arms and-or legs. The one-time therapy involved surgeons drilling a hole into the study participants' skulls and injecting stem cells in several locations around the area damaged by the stroke. These stem cells were harvested from the bone marrow of adult donors. They suffered minimal adverse effects such as temporary headaches, nausea and vomiting. "Their recovery was not just a minimal recovery like someone who couldn't move a thumb now being able to wiggle it. It was much more meaningful. One 71-year-old wheelchair-bound patient was walking again," said Steinberg, the study's lead author and chair of neurosurgery at Stanford who personally performed most of the surgeries. Steinberg said that the study does not support the idea that the injected stem cells become neurons, as has been previously thought. Instead, it suggests that they seem to trigger some kind of biochemical process that enhances the brain's ability to repair itself. "Patients improved by several standard measures, and their improvement was not only statistically significant, but clinically meaningful," Steinberg said. "Their ability to move around has recovered visibly. That's unprecedented. At six months out from a stroke, you don't expect to see any further recovery."

Comments

Re:Before anyone starts the FETUS wars...

[Jhon]

And "OH" -- the most interesting part (I didn't read the article cited in TFA, but I've read a few on this subject and know one of the folks in the trial) is that the stem cells die off pretty quick. They just seem to "spark" brain cells to go "Hey guys! Lets hold hands" and magically make new connections.

Re:Before anyone starts the FETUS wars...

[pjw2072]

Embryonic stem cells (and any kind of pluripotent stem cells) are hard to work with and haven't produced many results. Adult stem cells are much cheaper to work with and have produced a lot of good results. This isn't a PR issue, it's a technical issue.

Re:Before anyone starts the FETUS wars...

[damn_registrars]

And "OH" -- the most interesting part (I didn't read the article cited in TFA, but I've read a few on this subject and know one of the folks in the trial) is that the stem cells die off pretty quick. They just seem to "spark" brain cells to go "Hey guys! Lets hold hands" and magically make new connections.

I'm glad you pointed that out; I didn't have a chance to get to this discussion sooner. As a scientist - though not one involved in the study - I find myself wondering if this was a kind of apoptotic response. The stem cells probably found themselves in an unfamiliar environment (they were bone stem cells no longer subjected to bone cell transcription factors, bone cell extracellular matrix, etc) so they may have found themselves with nothing left to do but die. Apoptosis tends to leave tidy little packages in the wake of cell death (as opposed to cells going straight-up necrotic) which may have made some of their contents accessible to other cells. Neurons do live much more dynamic lives than we tend to give them credit for, so they may well have picked up these post-apoptotic packages and then responded to their contents.

One neat thing about such an approach is it should be fairly short lived on the molecular level, which seems to be just what we wanted here. The proteins and mRNA from the stem cells likely was degraded fairly quickly and almost certainly did not form a self-feedback loop. It sounds like magic, but it's really more like a crude attempt at gene hacking :)