Stem cell research

The first patient has been enrolled in a Phase 2 multicenter clinical trial testing the use of NurOwn cellular therapy to treat progressive multiple sclerosis (MS), BrainStorm Cell Therapeutics announced. The open-label trial (NCT03799718), titled Safety and Efficacy of Repeated Administration of neuron (MSC-NTF Cells) nin Participants…

The National Multiple Sclerosis Society is funding a new Phase 2 clinical trial to test the effectiveness of stem cell therapy on individuals with progressive forms of multiple sclerosis (MS), using mesenchymal stem cells from their own bone marrow. The ability of stem cells to both self-renew and create…

Academic neurologists are seeing many patients with neurological diseases interested in or receiving unapproved stem cell-based treatments, sometimes with negative health and/or financial consequences, according to a U.S. survey of neurologists. The data were reported by Wijdan Rai, MD, from Ohio State University in a poster titled “Complications of Stem Cell…

BrainStorm Cell Therapeutics announced the Cleveland Clinic is the first clinical site contracted in the United States for the Phase 2 multi-center study evaluating the company’s NurOwn mesenchymal stem cell (MSC) therapy in individuals with progressive multiple sclerosis (MS). “We are very excited to announce The Mellen Center for…

Stem cells tweaked in the laboratory have allowed researchers, reportedly for a first time, to generate and maintain ball-shaped cultures — called spheroids — of human brain cells in 3D that contain oligodendrocytes, the cells that produce myelin, along with neurons and the astrocytes that are essential to nerve cell health.

Blood Stem Cell Transplant Better than DMTs at Reducing Risk of Disease Progression in RRMS Here’s more evidence that hematopoietic stem cell transplant (HSCT) works better than some disease-modifying therapies (DMTs) at reducing multiple sclerosis (MS) progression. In this study, only three of 52 patients in the…

Autologous hematopoietic stem cell transplant is better than disease-modifying therapies (DMT) at reducing the risk of disease progression in patients with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis (RRMS), results from the MIST clinical trial show. The study “Effect of Nonmyeloablative Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplantation vs Continued Disease-Modifying Therapy on Disease Progression…

WeHealth, PathMaker Collaborating to Develop MyoRegulator as Noninvasive Treatment for Spasticity I’m one of the many people with multiple sclerosis (MS) for whom spasticity is a significant problem. This is a nonmedicinal approach to dealing with it. I hope it doesn’t take too long to make this…

BrainStorm Cell Therapeutics announced that the production of its therapy NurOwn will be expanded to support upcoming clinical trials, namely a Phase 3 trial in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and a Phase 2 trial in progressive multiple sclerosis (MS). BrainStorm’s proprietary, stem cell-based technology called…

Stem Cell Transplant Lessens Disability and Relapses in RRMS Patients, Phase 2 Trial Shows Here’s another study indicating that a stem cell transplant should be a treatment choice available to all MS patients where medically appropriate. Isn’t it past time to press harder on the stem cell…

Treatment with autologous hematopoietic stem cell transplant (aHSCT) led to a sustained decrease in disability and almost no clinical relapses in patients with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis (RRMS) who had failed to respond to prior immunosuppressive therapies, an Australian Phase 2 trial shows. Trial findings were published in the study, “Prospective phase…

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved BrainStorm Cell Therapeutics‘ request to open a Phase 2 clinical trial testing the safety and effectiveness of its proprietary NurOwn mesenchymal stem cell (MSC) treatment in progressive multiple sclerosis (MS) patients. The request was in the form of Investigational New Drug…

Artificial Intelligence May Help Reduce Dosage of Gadolinium in MRIs, Researchers Suggest There’s been concern recently about the accumulation of gadolinium in the brains of people who’ve had MRIs. Gadolinium is the dye that’s used to provide the “contrast” that can highlight lesions in the brain that might…

Human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs), the type of stem cells present in many tissues of adults, may be manipulated to fight inflammation and used as a cell therapy to treat inflammatory diseases like multiple sclerosis (MS), a study reports. In the future, researchers plan to use animal models to…

Atara Biotherapeutics’ investigational ATA190, a cell therapy that wipes out immune B-cells infected with the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), led to neurological improvements and reduced symptoms in patients with primary and secondary progressive multiple sclerosis (MS), a Phase 1 trial shows. The trial results were published in the Journal…

BrainStorm Cell Therapeutics is planning to launch a Phase 2 clinical trial in the United States to evaluate the safety and activity of its lead cell therapy candidate, NurOwn, in people with progressive multiple sclerosis (MS). The company announced that has submitted an Investigational New Drug (IND) application to…

Stanford Researchers Open Medical Cannabis Company with Oral Therapy for MS Pain, Spasticity as Initial Goal Let’s be clear up front. There’s no indication that you’ll be able to buy a cannabis pill from this company anytime soon — or ever. The company’s website says that testing…

“Deceptive” and “false” are two words used by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to describe marketing claims by two stem cell treatment clinics in California. According to an FTC complaint, the clinics had been advertising that they were using amniotic stem cell therapy to successfully treat serious diseases, including…

Stem cells from patients with Parkinson’s disease and primary progressive multiple sclerosis (PPMS) are soon to voyage into space, and be brought aboard the International Space Station so cell-to-cell interactions in these neurodegenerative diseases can be studied without gravitational forces acting on them. This research project, proposed to launch in May…

Treatment with autologous hematopoietic stem cell transplant (aHSCT) led to a safe and rapid lessening of disability and no clinical relapses in patients with aggressive multiple sclerosis (MS), according to a new study. The research, “The use of autologous hematopoietic stem cell transplantation as a…

In a previous column, I wrote about circumvention tourism, in which patients travel to another country to access a medical treatment that is unavailable in their home country. I wrote it in response to someone in the MS community who promoted travel to an offshore island…

Lower Fatigue Reported by MS Patients After aHSCT in Canadian Study Fatigue affects 90 percent of people with MS. It certainly impacts my life. This study, though very small, reports a 36 percent reduction in the median modified Fatigue Impact Scale (mFIS) score three years after autologous…

A small group of multiple sclerosis (MS) patients with aggressive disease, who were treated with hematopoietic stem cell transplant in a clinical trial, reported a drop in their fatigue levels that researchers suggested was likely due to lesser inflammation. The study, “Autologous hematopoietic stem cell transplantation improves…

I saw my neurologist earlier this week. After my work-up, we sat and discussed how well I manage my multiple sclerosis. How well? No comment. Suffice it to say this disease is a worthy adversary. I have been feeling a little funky since that appointment. I have been looking to…

Medical tourism is a term describing when people seek medical care by traveling from home countries to somewhere else. It’s an area of commerce that has existed for centuries, as people in ancient Greece once traveled to far away islands to visit healing gods. Medical tourism continues today, and…

Researchers at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine have developed a cutting-edge laboratory technique able to turn human stem cells – special cells able to grow into any type of cell in the body – into brain-like tissues in a culture dish. They intend to use their tool to study how myelination – the deposition of myelin around nerve cells – occurs in the central nervous system, and how diseases such as multiple sclerosis (MS) impair this process. The experimental protocol to grow these structures outside an organis) is described in the study, "Induction of myelinating oligodendrocytes in human cortical spheroids," published in the journal Nature Methods. These structures, called “oligocortical spheroids,” are small spheres that contain all the major cell types usually found in the human brain, including oligodendrocytes — cells that produce myelin, which is the fatty substance that insulates nerve fibers. Previous cerebral organoid techniques failed to include oligodendrocytes. “We have taken the organoid system and added the third major cell type in the central nervous system — oligodendrocytes — and now have a more accurate representation of cellular interactions that occur during human brain development,” Paul Tesar, PhD, associate professor of genetics and genome sciences at Case Western's medical school and the study's senior author, said in a press release. Oligodendrocytes are essential to good brain health. Without these cells, myelin production is hampered and nerve cells cannot communicate effectively, and eventually they start to deteriorate. This is the starting point for many neurological disorders caused by myelin defects, including MS and rare pediatric genetic disorders like Gaucher disease. Using this new organoid system and these myelin-producing cells, researchers intend to study the process of myelination — how it occurs in normal circumstances and how neurodegenerative diseases disrupt this process. “This is a powerful platform to understand human development and neurological disease,” Tesar said. “Using stem cell technology we can generate nearly unlimited quantities of human brain-like tissue in the lab. Our method creates a ‘mini-cortex,’ containing neurons, astrocytes, and now oligodendrocytes producing myelin. This is a major step toward unlocking stages of human brain development that previously were inaccessible.” Researchers not only demonstrated that they were capable of generating mature oligodendrocytes derived from human stem cells in vitro, but they also showed these cells were able to exert their function and produce myelin starting at week 20 in a culture dish. Their improved organoid system could also be used to test the effectiveness of potential myelin-enhancing treatments. “These organoids provide a way to predict the safety and efficacy of new myelin therapeutics on human brain-like tissue in the laboratory prior to clinical testing in humans,” said Mayur Madhavan, PhD, co-first author on the study. To prove this point, researchers treated organoids with promyelinating compounds known to enhance myelin production in mice, and measured the rate and extent of oligodendrocyte generation and myelination. Under normal conditions, adding promyelinating drugs to cultured organoids increased the rate and extent of oligodendrocyte generation and myelin production, the team reported. But results differed in important ways using diseased organoids.  Specifically, treating organoids generated from patients with Pelizaeus-Merzbacher disease — a fatal genetic myelin disorder — brought an in vitro recapitulation of the patients' symptoms. “Pelizaeus-Merzbacher disease has been a complicated disorder to study due to the many different mutations that can cause it and the inaccessibility of patient brain tissue,” said Zachary Nevin, PhD, co-first author on the study. “But these new organoids allow us to directly study brain-like tissue from many patients simultaneously and test potential therapies.” Altogether, these findings demonstrate that oligocortical spheroids could be a versatile in vitro system to study how myelination occurs in the central nervous system, and a possible model for testing new therapies for neurodegenerative disorders. “Our method enables generation of human brain tissue in the laboratory from any patient,” Tesar said. “More broadly, it can accurately recapitulate how the human nervous system is built and identify what goes wrong in certain neurological conditions.”

Lesser time spent exercising and using large muscles can result in serious alterations in the metabolism of brain stem cells and their ability to generate new nerve cells, a study suggests. These findings can help to explain why patients with neurological disorders, such as multiple sclerosis and spinal muscular atrophy,…

Fat-derived stem cells are a safe and feasible treatment strategy for patients with secondary progressive multiple sclerosis, results from a Phase 1/2 clinical trial show. Findings were published in the study, “Adipose-derived mesenchymal stem cells (AdMSC) for the treatment of secondary-progressive multiple sclerosis: A triple blinded,…

#AAN2018 – Stem Cell Transplant is Effective Treatment for ‘Aggressive’ MS, Study Shows I like the fact that a study shows that stem cell transplant treatment is effective for aggressive MS. I love the fact that the efficacy was dramatic, reducing the Expanded Disability Status Scale (EDSS) levels…

Autologous hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, also known as aHSCT, has been shown to be safe and highly effective to treat patients with "aggressive" multiple sclerosis. Tested in 19 patients, transplantation of stem cells was found to induce clinically meaningful improvements in disability. These findings were shared at the 2018 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Neurology (AAN) in Los Angeles, California. aHSCT uses a patient’s own healthy bone marrow stem cells, in combination with a much less aggressive chemotherapy and/or radiation regimen, to prepare the patient for the transplant. Previous studies have suggested that aHSCT is an effective strategy to treat patients with highly active relapsing-remitting MS (RRMS) who do not respond to available disease-modifying therapies (DMTs), and international guidelines advocate for its use in patients with "aggressive" MS. To further demonstrate the potential of aHSCT as a treatment for "aggressive" MS, a research team evaluated its safety and effectiveness in MS patients who had not been treated previously with DMTs. A total of 19 patients were treated across several clinical centers: seven patients were from Sheffield, U.K., seven from Uppsala, Sweden, four from Ottawa, Canada, and one patient was from Florence, Italy. All patients received aHSCT between May 2004 and May 2017. In addition to aHSCT, patients were treated with BEAM (carmustine, etoposide, cytarabine, melphalan) chemotherapy plus antithymocyte globulin (ATG) to reduce transplant rejection, or with Cytoxan (cyclophosphamide) with ATG, or the triple combination of Cytoxan, ATG, plus busulfan as conditioning regimens. Patients had a median age of 33 years at diagnosis and received the aHSCT by a median time of nine years after symptom onset. They had a median disability score of 6.5 before the treatment, as determined by the Expanded Disability Status Scale (EDSS). After a median follow-up period of 30 months, patients had a median EDSS score of 2.0, which represented a median improvement of 2 points (the higher the score, the worse the patient's disability level). None of the patients had clinical relapse following the transplant of stem cells. Only three patients developed new brain lesions detectable by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) at the first six-month follow-up evaluation, but no additional new lesions were detected in the following scans. The adverse effects reported during the study were comparable to those previously observed in similar treatments. No deaths related to the treatment were reported. Based on these preliminary results, the researchers concluded that aHSCT is “safe and highly effective in inducing rapid and sustain remission” in highly active MS, and "was associated with a significant improvement of [patient’s] level of disability.” “aHSCT should be considered as first line therapy in patients with ‘aggressive’ MS,” the team concluded. Another study presented at the AAN 2018 meeting further supports these findings, demonstrating the superior effectiveness of aHSCT over conventional DMTs for RRMS.