Not Parkinsons, but why not???
Brain Cell Transplantation Used To Repair Stroke-Induced Brain Damage
NASHVILLE, TN -- Feb. 5, 1999 -- Researchers who have pioneered a
technique of transplanting laboratory-grown neuronal cells into the
brains of stroke patients say that the procedure has been performed in
seven patients and some of those patients report that the therapy may
have helped to restore motor and speech skills that otherwise would have
been lost forever.
Scientists at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center have
treated seven stroke survivors with the therapy and they reported
results from their research today at the 24th American Heart Association
International Conference on Stroke and Cerebral Circulation.
"At this point, we're trying to evaluate if its feasible to put these
cells into the brain and whether the process is safe," said the study's
lead author, Douglas Kondziolka, M.D., professor of neurological surgery
and radiation oncology, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. "To
this date, it has been safe and there have been no problems noted.
That's been encouraging and the most important thing is hopefully this
will lead to a larger second study."
Of the seven patients who have been treated, all have been able to leave
the hospital within 24 hours and three have noticed small improvements
in motor skills, Kondziolka said. The patient who received the first
transplant -- a 62-year old woman who suffered a major stroke in the
fall of 1997 -- has felt well over the first seven months and has had
slight improvements in speech, Kondziolka explained.
"An important part of the research is that this is setting the
foundation for a possible future treatment," Kondziolka said. "It's like
in baseball -- you don't walk up to bat your first time and try to hit a
home run. If you can walk and get on base, you can set the stage for
something bigger later."
In the current study, researchers are examining men and women between
the ages of 40 to 75 who have had a stroke from six months to six years
prior to the treatment in order to determine whether or not they can get
motor skills to return through transplantation.
Currently, the only option available to most stroke survivors is
intensive rehabilitation in order to recover lost motor skills. This led
scientists to try a more radical approach -- direct transplantation of
neurons into the brain in the hopes that the new cells would link with
other cells in the same area to help restore speech and movement. In the
treatment, two to six million cells are transplanted in and around the
stroke-damaged areas of the brain.
The primary goal of this trial is to determine whether the therapy is
safe and can be tolerated by patients.
"If this first study is safe, we hope to move on to a second study that
will address patients with more diverse problems, using more cells and
putting them in different areas," Kondziolka said. "It's difficult to
say whether the functional gains some patients have described are due to
what we've done or something else. Theres still a lot of research to be
done and a lot of data to be collected before we can start this in a
larger number of people."
The brain cells used for the treatment are provided by Layton
Bioscience, Inc. LBS-neurons, as the laboratory-grown cells are called,
originate from human tumour tissue composed of embryonic-like cells. In
the laboratory, scientists have manipulated these cells to produce fully
differentiated, non-dividing neurons. The tumour tissue is a
teratocarcinoma, which occurs in the reproductive organs.
The surgeons use a computed tomography (CT) scan of the patient's brain
to identify three or more sites to inject the lab-grown cells. In the
patients, the injection points are located in the basal ganglia region
of the brain, Kondziolka said.
--
Gail Vass
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