Paralysed man walks again after cell transplant
bbc.com
bbc.com
I'm running the NYC Marathon to raise money for the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the lives of those with paralysis, mobility impairment, and spinal cord injury.
The Reeve Foundation has funded over $80 million for paralysis and spinal cord injury research. Scientists are learning more every year about how the spinal cord works, how nerve cells die and can be regenerated, and how new therapies can promote nerve regrowth. As a direct result of this research, there are people today who can breathe, control their bladder, and walk, after receiving treatment for severe spinal injury.
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Thanks for listening..
Thank you!
The article continues, "All those involved in the research are keen not to raise false hopes in patients and stress that the success will need to be repeated to show definitively whether it can stimulate spinal cord regeneration." Yes. This is a very early result, but there seems to be something here that has achieved results never before achieved, and if those results can be replicated in other patients, this will be great news.
The article mentions what kind of patients the experimental team is looking for. "Dr Tabakow said: "Our team in Poland would be prepared to consider patients from anywhere in the world who are suitable for this therapy. They are likely to have had a knife wound injury where the spinal cord has been cleanly severed." Many spinal cord injuries are bruises or tears rather than cuts, and may not heal as well with the technique described in the article. But this is a start, and may open up investigation of other approaches to repairing injuries to the spinal cord.
He's only got round to spinal injury's now because its something occasionally improves without aid and is therefore unreliably for scientific tests. He was looking at other types of injury (I can't remember the name) where the nerves to the arm are torn out, as this never shows any signs of recovery.
He's now moved on to knife wounds as these offer the cleanest types of complete break ie very unlikely to improve later.
Raisman has been thorough and methodical about this. Its his life's work and I have no doubt he'll succeed
(I was actually in hospital with Dan Nicholls, whose father has been funding Reiman's research http://www.nsif.org.uk/)
As you point out, this is not a "Eureka!" moment at all; it's a waypoint on an arduous path that has taken decades of work, and will continue on (largely equally slowly) for a long time to come.
The operation discussed in the article was two years ago; it's taken that much time (with intense physical therapy the entire time!) before he has gotten the mobility he has now.
Another group has previously found some mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) in the OM - or at least, cells with known MSC markers - so that's also a possibility for aiding repair. Very much looking forward to seeing where this research heads anyway.
This type of perseverance is admirable.
When the presenter asked him about the 40-year wait, he went quiet; then said something about having a duty to help these sufferers by continuing the work. Pretty inspiring.
He says that this is essentially a feasibility study showing safety, and that it was the unique situation of the patient where the cut was very narrow and clean that allowed this to happen; most other spinal injuries damage much more of the spinal column. He said he also wants to quantify exactly how much of the shown result was directly a result of the surgery. The patient had lots of different treatments and they don't know how much those had an effect.
However, when the interviewer said, "although you've added a note of caution there, should people with these kinds of injuries have a bit more hope now that this news has come out?" the response was, "absolutely, it shows that we are making inroads into this. This area, even just a few years ago was thought to be dead, but now we are making clinical trials."
Edit: Changed it from BBC News to SKY News. Oops.
Edit: The article did not mention stem cells, but I think stem cells will inevitably be discussed in this thread as they're a very closely related topic, hence the mention.
She also have this conspiracy theory about sport stars returning to sport 3 months after especially bad injuries - they must get stem cells, it's impossible otherways.
I don't know if it's true, I hope it is because it means it will eventually be used on regular people as well.
I see from Wikipedia that Geron Corporation have recently submitted 28,000 pages of documents to the FDA for a stem cell related trial so maybe in 2023 or some such we'll be able to do for people what we could do for rats in 2003.
No conspiracy, they are all using HGH. Someone did some analysis on the shortened recovery times for players with ligament tears (like ACLs) and found that while the recovery times have always been getting shorter thanks to improvements in physical therapy, but the there was a dramatic drop at about the time HGH started to be widely used.
The NFL just started lasting for HGH last month. The test supposedly is easy to beat, but it will be interesting to see if it has an effect on times.
So there's no single moment when this becomes "newsworthy"; but I'd assume that as of recently, the patient is walking at a level that's sufficiently impressive for a newscast, and so today's the day.
do you think the same technique can be used to reproduce damaged optical nerves ? this could be a huge step towards curing a huge percentage of blindness, something Ive been very personally interested in lately.
am I the only one who wonders why the slow pace of such crucial medical discoveries ? after a successful attempt, the future plan is treating only 10 more patients over the next 'years'. In Silicon valley timezone thats centuries, my non-medical tech corrupt mind is screaming pump money, replicate this to 100 patients in the next 60 days and scale, scale, scale!!!
Most likely the fear of any unknown side effects that haven't manifested just yet, and the ability to refine whatever procedure was performed to try and minimise any of the long term downsides to this approach?
Safety. What is there are horrible side effects that only show after 12/18/24 months and suddenly the lives of 100's of people are ruined? You could make that clear to people and if they want to participate despite the warnings let them but most people aren't well informed enough to make a rational decision.
That said, this result should, in a just world, dramatically increase sources of funding and research worldwide.
I suppose the biggest "bottleneck" in the progress of such work is testing.
What is the current state of computer simulations of bio systems? Is OpenWorm the biggest project in this direction? If I remember correctly, they weren't exactly simulating completely down to the cellular organelle (or atomic) level, but instead simulated starting from higher level of abstraction (muscle contraction etc.).
From what I understand once a nerve is injured processes continue that result in less and less activity. When you're treating an injury as old as his, you not only have to "make the connections", but also reverse any nerve atrophy (for lack of a better word).