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When I began these wide-ranging weekly articles on various disabilities, my overriding goal has been one in which I've always tried to end each article with a positive something. It could be, for example, a treatment, medication, surgery or whatever, all of which could make any given disability easier to cope with, overcome and live with by that person with a disability.
Imagine, then, my excitement at the actual and achievable recoveries that have been realized in such previously judged as not-recoverable disabilities as cerebral palsy, traumatic brain injuries, spinal cord injuries and strokes, with many of those recoveries being made possible with the use of adult stem cells.
More specifically, an increasing number of researchers working with adult stem cells now seem to agree that such therapies could quickly and significantly improve the recovery of motor function in animal models for the ischemic brain injury, for example, that occurs in about 10 percent of babies with cerebral palsy.
Athersys Inc., a Cleveland-based biopharmaceutical company pursuing cell therapy programs in cardiovascular disease, stroke, cancer and other diseases, has recently been funding research in which more than 200,000 adult stem cells provided by Athersys were injected directly into the brain injury sites of test animals of the many researchers they have been funding. According to Athersys, those adult stem cells were taken from the bone marrow of rats for dosing in their now-disabled laboratory rats. This info was reviewed from Athersys' website as of Nov. 23.
Their researchers' lab reports indicate that exactly one week after a brain injury was introduced into each of the tests' lab rats, adult stem cells were injected directly into the brains of each of the 22 test animals. Behavioral tests on each now-disabled lab rat were then administered seven days after the transplants, all of which showed a trend toward recovery, followed by significant recovery, by day 14.
As research projects using adult stem cells increase, the release of public information in an announcement during the week of Oct. 10 discussed one of the first- ever introductions of adult stem cells at the site of a longtime spinal cord injured patient at the Shepherd Institute in Georgia. That announcement also noted that this stem cell therapy was the first-ever use of stem cells at the site of a longtime and older SCI patient with the hoped-for purpose of reversing that patient's paralysis.
(To read the rest of this article, please click on the link in this blog post's title above this blog post.)
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