An international team has shown that the injection of a type of stem cell into the brains of patients living with progressive multiple sclerosis MS is safe, well tolerated and has a long-lasting effect that appears to protect the brain from further damage.
I am cautiously very excited about our findings, which are a step towards developing a cell therapy for treating MS. The study, led by scientists at the University of Cambridge, University of Milan Bicocca and Hospital Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza Italy , is a step towards developing an advanced cell therapy treatment for progressive MS. Over 2 million people live with MS worldwide, and while treatments exist that can reduce the severity and frequency of relapses, two-thirds of MS patients still transition into a debilitating secondary progressive phase of disease within years of diagnosis, where disability grows steadily worse.
A particular type of macrophage known as a microglial cell is found throughout the brain and spinal cord. In progressive forms of MS, they attack the central nervous system CNS , causing chronic inflammation and damage to nerve cells.
Recent advances have raised expectations that stem cell therapies might help ameliorate this damage. Previous work from the Cambridge team has shown in mice that skin cells re-programmed into brain stem cells, transplanted into the central nervous system, can help reduce inflammation and may be able to help repair damage caused by MS.
Now, in research published in the Cell Stem Cell , scientists have completed a first-in-human, early-stage clinical trial that involved injecting neural stem cells directly into the brains of 15 patients with secondary MS recruited from two hospitals in Italy. The stem cells were derived from cells taken from brain tissue from a single, miscarried foetal donor. The Italian team had previously shown that it would be possible to produce a virtually limitless supply of these stem cells from a single donor β and in future it may be possible to derive these cells directly from the patient β helping to overcome practical problems associated with the use of allogeneic foetal tissue.
