First-of-its-kind trial enables paralysed man to stand via stem cell injection | Hacker News Reader

First-of-its-kind trial enables paralysed man to stand via stem cell injection

nature.com

175 pointsbentobean34 comments

Possibly enables him to stand, according to the article - several other patients weren't helped by the treatment, and in the case that showed a positive effect the researchers currently can't eliminate the possibility of natural recovery causing the improvement.

But it's promising work, shows the treatment seems at least to be safe, and more research will no doubt follow to clarify this.

It wasn’t clear from the article: how do you naturally recover from a spinal cord injury? I’m assuming we can’t be talking about a fully severed spinal cord.

Is it common to recover from a spinal cord injury that leads to some sort of paralysis?

Common? No idea.

I witnessed someone paralyzed from cervical radiculopathy in the neck caused by youthful horseplay. Full recovery within a month. Scared us all when he went limp.

Nerves do regrow, just very very slowly.

Nerves do regrow, but not from the spinal cord as I understand it, and just because they regrow does not mean they regrow along the path which is needed to repair function.

My father broke his Bricial Plexis (the nerves running through your shoulder to your arm). There was an 18 hour surgery to re-trace the path for the nerves to grow. Some nerves made a connection, and he has minimal movement in his fingers. However, most of his arm is still paralyzed.

I got the ear nerve almost severed as a kid and I am still 100% deaf from that ear, it's been 30 years already.

What, shouldn't that nerve be more ...internal...what crazy head injury did you sustain

If you don't mind sharing, how did it happen?

Removal of https://radiopaedia.org/articles/intracranial-epidermoid-cys...

The man in question can and did stand, no 'possibly' about it.

This statement a specific case is different than the probability of it working in general.

> The man in question can and did stand, no 'possibly' about it.

Nobody said otherwise. It's still very true that this treatment only possibly enabled him to stand.

From the article:

>Larger trials will be needed to establish whether the improvements observed in the two individuals in the current study were a result of the treatment.

Sorry, misread your post.

Easy way to eliminate the possibly.

Stop the immunosuppressant pills and see what happens.

2015: Human embryonic stem cells in the treatment of patients with spinal cord injury

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4627203/

How does a stem cell with somebody else's DNA not trigger your own immune system? I'd understand if you could repurpose your own bone marrow (which is a type of stem cell, right?) or neurological stem cells, but I'd sort of expect the immune system to reject others similar to a bad organ transplant or wrong blood type transfusion.

From the article:

> Recipients were given immune-suppressing drugs to prevent their bodies from attacking the cells for six months after the surgery.

Seems like it would need to be lifelong because those cells end up differentiating and fixing the damage so they will always be in there.

Immunosuppressive or immune modulating drugs are not that bad. Usually people can take them without too much issues. Yes: Your risk for cancer increases a bit and you have to be careful to not get sick etc. but overall its not that bad.

Most people who have autoimmune diseases also need to take those drugs usually for life – (smaller dosages but still)...

Not all are "not that bad". Dimethyl-fumarate which I take for MS is not as bad (nor strong), but there are ones with a very serious side-effect profile. I am happy I could stick to dimethyl-fumarate. I still have to have blood tests done every 3 months to see if my liver is OK, but then again, I take Silymarin and NAC, so should be OK.

For the curious, NAC is given for people with acetaminophen toxicity which destroys your liver.

Silymarin is from Milk Thistle.[1]

[1] https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/422884, https://web.archive.org/web/20250101032455/https://www.medsc...

> and you have to be careful to not get sick etc.

Sooo easy.

Especially if you have kids.

or work in an office, one kid gets sick, guess what, now it's your problem

I have sympathy for people with autoimmune diseases on immunosuppressants who have family in developing countries, where a lot of complicated infections are easier to catch. They solve the problem in the context of our (generally? decreasingly?) sterile world, but not globally.

I take dimethyl-fumarate, and I have been at the hospital for a week getting very high doses of corticosteroid infusions, and thankfully I did not catch anything. I have not had common cold for almost a decade, yet I have been on steroids (both via IV and pills) and I have been on an immunomodulator (not suppressant, however) for almost a decade.

I have not even caught COVID yet been exposed to it (has been quarantined three times with someone with COVID).

These medications for MS are very expensive, but since in Hungary there are subsidies for it, it costs as much as 1 USD instead of 1500 USD per month.

Biologics are phenomenal for this. Especially the selective ones.

Sadly, they are also inaccessible to people of lower socioeconomic status.

It would seem worthwhile to bank things like umbilical cord blood so that if these therapies work in the future, you have a supply of your own cells. Immunosuppressive therapy isn’t that fun.

That would be cool, being able to generate stem cells with your own DNA dynamically later in life would be cooler (please pardon my elementary biology approach to this, I know that is an an Everest sized mountain to climb)

There are companies now offering stem cell culturing and storage from adult samples. Something I've been meaning to look into actually.

That’s truly amazing! Maybe someday we can heal brain damage his way.

https://archive.ph/DRYvk

Could a bio compatible gel containing steroids not work instead of systemically giving steroids?

Isn't Ronnie Coleman also going through this to be able to walk again?

sorry, slightly offtopic: does anyone have any experience or can recommend good clinics (in europe) for doing stem-cell therapy for lower back pain (damaged discs)?

There was some guy on reddit 10 years ago who got stem cell injections in China and was able to walk after being paralyzed and posted about it. Almost everyone on the thread gaslighted him that he must have never actually been paralyzed or was lying. The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.

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