Japanese scientists use stem cell treatment to restore movement in spinal injury | Hacker News Reader

Japanese scientists use stem cell treatment to restore movement in spinal injury

medicalxpress.com

259 pointspseudolus42 comments

Some more details from the general press: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20250321_21/

and here: https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asia/article/3303473/jap...

Such operations have a history - the first successful one was carried in 2014 in Poland: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-29645760

Also, I'm pretty sure U Mich had a trial to do implants in ALS patients, but not sure if it ever got beyond Phase I

I wonder what this would cost to have done. I have a relative that was left paralyzed after a spinal cord injury, would love for them to be able to try something like this.

Edit: looks like it has to be a pretty recent injury... "14-28 days prior"

Potentially this technique can be improved to include longer period injuries, it’s a good development.

So, perhaps not for MS, then, either, if one has had mobility issues for years. :(

MS can be treated with stem cells, but it's pretty scorched earth. Basically it's a similar protocol for stubborn forms of leukemia: extract stem cells, program and cultivate them into immune cells, nuke your ENTIRE immune system, then put you in a bubble for a few months while the stem-cell-grown immune cells develop into a new immune system in your body.

I was diagnosed with ALS and had lots of pain in my legs. I unfortunately couldn’t walk and was in a wheelchair. The disease progressed quickly, and there’s been little or no progress in finding reliable medical treatment for this horrible disease. In January this year our family doctor decided I should try alternative treatment as riluzole 50 mg didn’t slow the progression; I agreed and decided to start the ALS/MND protocol offered at UineHealth Centre. It’s been 4 months into the treatment, and the disease is totally under control, with no signs of muscle weakness, muscle pain, or choking when I eat. I recently have been able to walk down our street and back, something which I couldn't do prior to this year. I’m active again, and it has given me a better chance of fighting this disease. The ALS/MND treatment has relieved my symptoms significantly. I can feel my strength again; I feel better now than I have felt in years. You can find the treatment at the uinehealthcentre. com

This seems to be the research group involved:

https://www.med.keio.ac.jp/gcoe-stemcell/english/member/okan...

Why can't I upvote this topic? The only option is "flag" (and hide and favorite)

Usually indicates that you already have, you can check your history in your profile.

So are stem cells a 'real' thing now? I can never tell, and I'm not sure that I trust a website called 'medicalxpress' (which has a nag screen that ominously warns me about the 'consequences' of my using an adblocker).

I have torn shoulder labrum that I've been living with for 8ish years now. It doesn't affect me enough to need surgery, but given the option I'd love to fix it without having to go under the knife. I sporadically hear about stem cell injections as a possible fix, and as a sports fan there are always stories about athletes using stem cells to repair serious injuries. Sometimes these stories involve the athletes traveling to another country (Germany, Thailand, Mexico, somewhere) where stem cell treatments are legal outside of the FDA's bureaucratic purview. (The FDA has been working on authorizing European sunscreen for the last 25 years, BTW). The UFC now advertises a Mexican stem cell clinic. I asked my ortho last year about them and she said 'maybe!', which I suppose is better than 'no they're a total fraud'. Are these claims even approaching reality? Is the science of stem cells getting closer at all?

Marc Benioff said UCSF used Yamanaka’s techniques to regrow his Achilles in place. So it seems that we are getting there.

Unfortunately my disposable income to spend on experimental medical treatments is slightly less than Marc Benioff's :(

If only we could all be so rich. Have you looked into PRP? My neighbor got an injection for his shoulder, $3k here, although apparently you can find it for way less.

I had PRP done in 2008 for $1K and it healed a 8 year old persistent knee injury within 3 months.

That said I’m not sure if it’s necessarily the stem cells that did the healing or just the general irritation of the area that reminds the body that it might want to reexamine healing that specific area. I believe the French were injecting irritants in the 90s (forgot what chemical it was). Because PRP is injecting something sourced from your own body it can skip many regularity steps that would be required by some other chemical. I don’t know how much of PRP is simply a low regulation irritant and how much of it is stem cells, my guess it’s more the former than the latter.

Edit; Googling it now: Prolotherapy which has a long rich history, modern PRP alternatives seem to be salt and or sugar water based. Seems like some studies suggest there isn’t much difference in outcomes between salt water injections and PRP injections.

Addendum; it was one of the most painful surgeries I’ve done, I’m anesthetic resistant and they used basically none off it. An ultrasound was used for guiding the needle. The injury location was in the back of the knee and they wanted to be careful they didn’t inject into a nerve. When asked how would they know if they hit a nerve, they responded “your screams of pain will go up an octave”. They did hit a nerve and I let them know it.

Be careful with anecdotes. The history of stem cell treatments is full of promising claims that later failed to differentiate from standard treatments.

A common technique in the past was to use stem cell therapy on a lot of candidate patients who had some chance of recovering normally. When some subset recovered normally, they would champion them as stem cell success stories.

It's an interesting field, but anecdotes are not the right way to look at it. Even when they come from famous figures.

Yamanaka won a Nobel prize for the work so while I shared an anecdote, it is more than that.

> So are stem cells a 'real' thing now?

Always were a real possibility and under active research but the unregulated treatments you read about in Mexico, Thailand etc were probably snake-oil rather than targeted, effective medicine.

The unregulated stuff has alway seemed to involve just injecting some sort of stem-cell milkshake into the affected area and hoping it does something useful. The attached article describes a more involved process.

Both things can be true - those clinics are doing bullshit medicine, and stem-cell treatments can maybe be made to work.

The question is whether this "more involved process" builds upon experience from the first years of almost-quackery. It wouldn't be the first time in healthcare.

People have eyes, observe their results and adapt.

Seems unlikely, far more likely that it has built upon the history of actual research, than the exploitative practices of those clinics that latch on and sell snake-oil.

People move around, including doctors. Even knowing what doesn't work can help future patients.

For an example, most of urgent medicine (e.g. battlefields) in history was built on this sort of chaotic progress, and not on meticulous scientific research.

It's not progress if it's just exploiting something people associate with high-tech medical magic, but that isn't contributing to the literature or sum of human knowledge, merely to the bank-accounts of the cowboys running the show.

Why are you so keen to attribute scientific breakthroughs to ... well to quacks? On the one hand we have bona-fide research by people understanding the science, using animal models to test and understand, building up sound scientific basis for treatment etc, and on the other we have people injecting god knows what into anyone with enough money, some of it human-origin, some of it not, very unlikely to be contributing to any corpus of knowledge, all because rubes heard "stem cells" on the news and think they're magic.

These are not serious doctors working on breakthroughs by disregarding the stuffy old rules that hold them back (though that's certainly one way they like to sell themselves), they're quacks selling bullshit and scamming people.

I would argue it’s only cowboys participating because the FDA has effectively told everybody the only way to play by the rules is by spending large sums of time and money which gate-keeps new entrants and stifles progress and contribution to the sum of human knowledge.

The bar can be lowered without allowing snake oil and holding snake oil salesman accountable, granted this is much harder to do when people travel internationally. At that point, the consumer owns the risk they are taking, regardless of how precarious the situation is.

This is an over-regulated industry that has been captured by existing entities who would rather pay the exorbitant fees for incredible returns than allow new entrants to the market.

That's really orthoganal to the question of "are stem cell clinics in Mexico a scam?"

Is there too much regulation in medicine? Could be. There's certainly regulatory capture evident in many parts of many economies.

You say orthogonal, I say it makes the question moot by solving the issue upstream from the “need” for suspicious and unregulated medical treatments.

I don't think it would - if the treatment has both been hyped in the press as a potential panacea, and yet is not at a stage of development where any honest practitioner would offer it, there is still a gap where the cowboys will jump in and sell to the desperate.

iPS cells in vitro for experiments have been a thing for over a decade now...

In vivo experiments face more regulations bc...well, stem cells are very close to cancer cells and bad things have happened....

Can also be true that those clinics work, based on my research I believe the more reputable ones do.

Medicalxpress is a subsidiary of the more known https://phys.org/ which is a decades-old aggregator of published material containing innovative studies and engineering techniques. They write their own summaries in an AP/Reuters style but with more quantified detail and less exaggeration than the usual pop media and university PR pieces. A bit like Quanta Magazine, great for keeping tabs on new findings with clear and consistent hyperlinks to the source material.

Medicalexpress is a reputable medical news website. Regarding the adblocker, how else would u earn money.

The FDA doesn't even go over domestic supplements. Most domestic supplements don't even contain the stated ingredients and many contain illegal ingredients.

Something like 25 years to authorize European sunscreen looks like a corrupt move. Some business interest definitely is influencing it to make it happen.

>Are these claims even approaching reality? Is the science of stem cells getting closer at all?

I've heard many many anecdotal claims of this working. We'll have to see.

You'd think a technical site like ycombinator, ppl would post directly from pubmed/europe pmc...I mean, ppl post CS papers from Arxiv regularly...

I think in practice most papers are too technical to be meaningfully read by people outside the field. I struggle with some CS papers especially depending subfield. I could probably get through this stem cell paper if I had 8 hours and a medical reference dictionary, and it still would probably involve several side quests reading up on related topics and citations before I could meaningfully deliver an opinion. That makes these science reporting sites a necessary evil IMHO.

I had type 2 SLAP tear (lemme guess, rock climbing?) confirmed by MRI with dye. It seemed to just... go asymptomatic after months of rest, gradual return to activity. Some guy on reddit said stem cells from mexico fixed his SLAP tear but he never went for a followup MRI so who knows.

BJJ. Good luck, but just so you know- SLAP tears don't heal on their own. There's not enough bloodflow to the area, and the actual physical substance of the labrum for the both of us has been ripped apart. It may or may not bother you (mine doesn't 80% of the time), but it also never heals. So you're at risk of tearing it further, which then becomes a Big Deal. I stopped doing BJJ for this reason

I'm well aware of all of that after multiple consultations with my surgeon.

I have some hope that, among the assorted mayhem, the Trump administration makes the FDA a bit more permissive.

Given RFK needs HGH and steroids to stay alive I think they will unregulate everything but the truth

Using IPSCs to regrow tissue, including nerve and connective tissue that just doesn't heal on its own, is definitely a thing that's about to happen. There have been promising clinical trials, and the techniques probably need to be refined to where they can be done safely at scale. But they're coming.

These wildcat stem cell clinics in Central and South America promoted by bodybuilders, UFC people, and other athletes -- most of them are scams. The scammy ones inject stem cells at the site and sort of hope they do the right thing. Sometimes they do the wrong thing, and develop into cancer! Be aware that insurance, or your country's nationalized health care program, usually does not cover these clinics, and you will at best be paying tens of thousands of dollars out of your own pocket for a stem cell therapy that is at best highly experimental and may not have the effects you want. They operate Stateside too, my wife and I were approached by one. We took the free dinner and then noped out.

But hey, your body, your choice. If it were me, I'd wait a bit for something that's a bit more proven, unless I were critically injured or ill. But it is coming, and it won't be long now.

The easy way to tell:

If the clinic is charging you to get stem cell therapy - probably a scam

If the clinic is paying you to get stem cell therapy (most clinical trials include a stipend for study participants), and there's a legit entry on clinicaltrails.gov - likely legit.

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