11 ms·

Canadian doctors reverse severe MS using stem cells

371 points by yurisagalov 10y ago

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
tempestn 10y ago
Sounds like another good reason to consider banking stem cells, as described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11830407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11830407 In this case the article describes using chemotherapy to stimulate generation of stem cells, then scrubbing them of the disease before reintroducing. I have no expertise in this field, but I would think having a bank of healthy stem cells would have simplified the procedure and perhaps improved the likelihood of positive outcomes. @markkat if you're reading this, do you have any comment?
- blisterpeanuts 10y ago
  In the study, the patients' immune systems were cleansed of the agent or agents that caused the autoimmune response. The agent might be present from birth; no one knows what it is, even today. Thus, unfortunately, banking stem cells and restoring them to the body might have the opposite effect of a cure. If they can figure out how to isolate only the specific agents that trigger the attacks on myelin, that would obviously be a huge step forward.
- markkat 10y ago
  >I would think having a bank of healthy stem cells would have simplified the procedure and perhaps improved the likelihood of positive outcomes. It is possible, assuming that the banked cells were drawn before progression to a disease state. Here, they used the patient's own cells, which they treated before reintroduction, which strongly suggests there is a state to which they can be reverted. It's reasonable then to assume that at the very least, previously banked cells could be similarly treated before reintroduction, which might be a better starting point. As speculated in the article, those patients that did not respond might have progressed too far for the treatment to work. If so, cells banked years before might be advantageous. Of course, that may not be reason why those patients didn't respond. Much of MS still remains a mystery. Still, these results are very exciting, and add to the growing evidence that bone marrow stem cells have real clinical potential. I'll ask our Chief Science Officer, Dr. Ben Buller, to discuss this trial in our blog: http://foreverlabs.co/blog http://foreverlabs.co/blog He has published work using bone MSCs to reverse demyelination, which occurs in MS. I'm sure he'll have some good perspective.
DrJohanson 10y ago
What is a "MS"?
polard2 10y ago
It's very rarely lethal. That being said, lots of people can die from complications due to MS.
lvs 10y ago
A nice longterm study. However, the fact that they need to specify in the title of this lay article that "this isn't hype" really says it all about science "journalism."
- ohthehugemanate 10y ago
  Also the fact that if you read the study, it IS hype. (fromory, because I'm mobile) One study, of 24 people. The treatment is only for 5% of MS sufferers, and it's 70% effective at stopping the progress of the disease. Only 3 of the patients in the study had a reversal like the case they describe, so 12%. And the treatment is incredibly rough on the body. One person in this study died from treatment, but almost everyone else suffered at the high end of the scale. The not hype version would be "Potential treatment for 3% of MS patients in extreme risk cases! It even reverses the disease for a lucky handful." It is a bug advance, but... Well this is Vox, after all.
  - Houshalter 10y ago
    Well the title wasn't "MS universally cured". It's significant progress towards a cure. And curing 3% of a disease that afflicts millions of people is still tens of thousands of lives saved.
    - RobertoG 10y ago
      And, more interesting, I think, it confirms the theory of what cause the illness. That was not so clear the last time I read about it. That in itself is a big advancement.
  - yompers888 10y ago
    Thank you for your diligence.
  - namuol 10y ago
    > Only 3 patients in the study had a reversal It was actually 8 of the 24 that saw recovery so that's 33%.
jiang01 10y ago
WORK HARDER FOR THAT LETTER OF RECOMMENDATION, UNPAID PEASANT
purpleidea 10y ago
I believe this might have been the study where 25%(?) of the patients were killed by the treatment. As a result, this is only indicated for the very severe RRMS (relapsing-remitting, not related to Stallman) cases. I'm sure HN can correct me if I'm wrong, but the point to make is that this isn't a cure.
- sago 10y ago
  Maybe you can read the article and correct yourself? 1/24 patients died during the trial (no causal link was specified), and the treatment was given to progressive MS patients (PPMS or SPMS).
djaychela 10y ago
There was a comment on this on BBC breakfast yesterday, with an MS specialist saying that it was promising, but not up to the hype that people were making over it? He said it was an Avenue to explore further, and looked to be a good technique, but there was a long way to go - he quoted the stats from the study, and certainly seemed to be familiar with it and the methodology used. Can't find a link to it (it was an interview rather than a feature), alas.
cring1 10y ago
Sorry for my ignorance, but how does MS become lethal?
Hondor 10y ago
That all happened 15 years ago. The article mentions that it's available at some hospitals, so that suggests it was ultimately successful and it's now part of regular medicine. I suppose it's still only for 5% of cases and only as a last resort and still most patients aren't having any reversal of their disease. There doesn't sound like much hope for it to expand to cure MS in general given how long it's been with apparently no further progress.
- bhouston 10y ago
  > still most patients aren't having any reversal of their disease From the article, "70 percent saw the progression of their disease halted or reversed" 70% change of no further progression or even reversal? Those are good odds.
  - jacalata 10y ago
    That was patients in the study, the comment was about all patients with MS.
  - Hondor 10y ago
    I was just stating the outcome in a more negative way. Most had no reversal but also most didn't get worse either. Because half of that 70% were in the "halted" category which might not be much use if you're already at a late stage of the disease and you were only eligible for this treatment because you were almost dead.
  - bshanks 10y ago
    "One patient died, which puts the potential for death from this procedure at around 4 percent, and severe infections after stem cell treatments — the kind Molson picked up, or worse — are also common."
jawns 10y ago
Just in case anyone is wondering -- though at this point, isn't it your first guess? -- the stem cells used in this therapy were adult stem cells, meaning they were collected from her own body, as opposed to embryonic stem cells. I mention it here because the article doesn't give that info until about half-way down.
- Teever 10y ago
  I don't understand why you felt it necessary to mention this. I think it's half-way down in the article because it's not really the most important aspect of the conversation. I think the fact that MS has been cured in some people for the first time is far more relevant than the source of the stemcells used to cure MS.
  - KevanM 10y ago
    Depends how you feel about stem cell research.
    - forthefuture 10y ago
      I long for days when it won't really matter how you feel about stem cell research.
    - dave_sullivan 10y ago
      I feel like it's been held back for a decade or two by, mostly, the religious right, and I wonder how many people's lives are worse off as a result.
      - refurb 10y ago
        Why was it held back? The only legislation passed was around gov't funding of new embyonic stem cell lines. Private money has no restrictions.
      - wtbob 10y ago
        I wonder how many more lives would have been ended had federal dollars funded research using embryonic stem cells.
reasonattlm 10y ago
Publicity materials: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-06/tl-tln060816.php http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-06/tl-tln060816.... Paper: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(16)30169-6/abstract http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67... The latest update for ongoing efforts to test destruction and recreation of the immune system in patients suffering from the autoimmune disease multiple sclerosis demonstrate that this approach is effectively a cure if the initial destruction of immune cells is comprehensive enough. Researchers have been able to suppress or kill much of the immune system and then repopulate it with new cells for about as long as the modern stem cell therapy industry has been underway, something like fifteen years or so. Methodologies have improved, but the destructive side of this process remains unpleasant and risky, something you wouldn't want to try if there was any good alternative. Yet if not for the scientific and commercial success of immunosuppressant biologics such as adalimumab, clearance and recreation of immune cell populations may well have become the major thrust of research for other prevalent autoimmune conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis. Destroying these immune cell populations requires chemotherapy, however, and with avoiding chemotherapy as an incentive for patients, and the ability to sell people drugs for life as an incentive for the medical industry, biologics won. For conditions like rheumatoid arthritis, the aim became control and minimization of symptoms rather than the search for a cure. Only in much more damaging, harmful autoimmune conditions like multiple sclerosis has this research into wiping and rebuilding the immune system continued in any significant way. It is worthy of note that while these trials were only enrolling a small minority of patients, the approach could be used on every patient. That tends to be the way trials work, picking a small subset. The driving factor for keeping the numbers small is the onerous and risky chemotherapy process. Beyond being able to pinpoint which tissues are suffering damage due to inappropriately targeted immune cells, the underlying mechanisms of most autoimmune conditions are very poorly understood. Multiple sclerosis, for example, results from immune cells attacking the myelin sheathing essential for proper nerve function. Collectively, the cells of the immune system maintain a memory of what they intend to target, that much is evident, but the structure and nature of that memory is both very complex and yet to be fully mapped to the level of detail that would allow the many types of autoimmunity to be clearly understood. That these autoimmune conditions are all very different is evidenced from the unpredictable effectiveness of today's immunosuppressant treatments - they work for some people, not so well for others. Many autoimmune diseases may well turn out to be categories of several similar conditions with different roots in different portions of the immune system. Destruction of the immune system offers a way around present ignorance: it is an engineering approach to medicine. If immune cell populations can be removed sufficiently comprehensively, then it doesn't really matter how they are storing the bad data that produces autoimmunity. That data is gone, and won't return when immune cells are restored through cell therapies. The cost of that process today is chemotherapy, which is not to be taken lightly, as the results presented here make clear. A mortality rate of one in twenty is enough to give pause, even if you have multiple sclerosis. In the future, however, much more selective cell destruction mechanisms will be developed, such as some of those emerging from the cancer research community, approaches that will make an immune reboot something that could be undertaken in a clinic with no side-effects rather than in a hospital with all the associated damage of chemotherapy. Autoimmune diseases are far from the only reason we'd want to reboot our immune systems: as we age, the accumulated impact of infections weighs heavily upon the immune system, and its limited capacity fills with uselessly specialized cells rather than those capable of destroying new threats. Failure of the immune response is a large part of age-related frailty, leading to both chronic inflammation and vulnerability to infection, and it is something that could be addressed in large part by an evolution of this approach to autoimmune disease.
wildmXranat 10y ago
I live in Canada. I just listened to one of the participants talk about the experience on the radio and I found it just incredible. In her own words, "She could not feel her body from the neck down. After the long and gruel ordeal procedure, she began to get sensation back. Things like hot and cold water began to be discernible. She no longer needed to hold both railings when walking down stairs in her home, needing a cane to get the mail, etc ..." She said that it gave her her life back. She said that in short time, she began to get bored with doing the regular, tired routine and actually got a part-time job. I mean, all that sounds phenomenal.
- cpncrunch 10y ago
  It does sound phenomenal, but bear in mind there was no placebo control, so we don't know how much of the effect was due to the placebo effect. Generally the placebo effect will vary depending on the type of intervention. A very novel and invasive intervention like this will have a high placebo effect. Remember Liberation Therapy? Given that psychological treatment alone can reduce the fatigue in MS to below that of healthy controls (van Kessel 2008), it's likely that the placebo effect plays a large role. (The placebo effect will also affect pain, weakness and numbness, as the part of the brain that produces fatigue - the anterior cingulate cortex and insular cortex - also produces those symptoms).
  - zxv 10y ago
    Hang on a minute. Placebo effect does not explain regaining sensation, nor regaining ability walking.
    - patall 10y ago
      That's exactly the placebo effect. You think that you get a treatment and your body reacts to that
    - jMyles 10y ago
      For the purposes of clinical trials, are there any conditions that are excluded as possible placebo effects?
BurningFrog 10y ago
This is the tech support approach to the immune system: Try turning it off and on again.
- YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
  A corollary of which is that the immune system runs on MS Windows.
  - dclowd9901 10y ago
    Given its baffling nature, I'd say that's a pretty apt comparison.
thatha7777 10y ago
Does this teach us anything about the causes of MS, and potentially inform on preventative measures?
xor_null 10y ago
Quite interesting. But something i don't understand, MS causes immune cells to attack the myelin cells. Depending on the severe of the attack the myelin cells are completly destroyed or even the nerv cells themselves are destroyed. Recreating the immun cells would prevent the immun cells from attacking the myelin cells, but what happens to the tissues which are already destroyed? As far as i know, the body is not able to repair all kind of destroyed nerv cells / myelin cells on his own. So how can this treatment help to repair/recover already destroyed tissue?
hvs 10y ago
A similar (smaller) study was done back in 2003 with Crohn's disease. The results were similar. http://www.nature.com/bmt/journal/v32/n1s/full/1703945a.html http://www.nature.com/bmt/journal/v32/n1s/full/1703945a.html A more recent, better controlled study found very little difference between traditional treatment, though. http://www.news-medical.net/news/20151218/Stem-cell-therapy-not-significantly-better-than-conventional-treatment-for-Crohns-disease.aspx http://www.news-medical.net/news/20151218/Stem-cell-therapy-...
jeroen 10y ago
> And there are questions about the very long-term effects. It’s not clear what the next 10, 20, or 50 years look like for patients like Molson. Does that even matter? Molson would probably be dead right now if it weren't for the treatment, not to mention an enormous increase in quality of life. Even if the treatment kills her in 10 years, she will have had 25 years of a proper life, versus a few more years of lying in bed. Of course long term effects are interesting to study and see if there is room for improvement, but I don't see them impact the validity of the treatment.
indymike 10y ago
My Dad had MS and died earlier this year of pneumonia. MS is a horrible disease in every way. It's debilitating, humiliating, and painful. Hopefully this study can be repeated. So many studies using whatever is the trendy science of the day end up failing. This study looks hopeful and could be life changing in the best way possible. But it's not the first study that has started with an amazing result.
kakoni 10y ago
Related; Type 1 diabetes being also auto-immune disease. There have been now atleast 2 groups that have succesfully done "cure" using same kind of immune system reboot strategy. few interesting links; [1] http://cureresearch4type1diabetes.blogspot.fi/2008/12/burts-brazilian-research.html http://cureresearch4type1diabetes.blogspot.fi/2008/12/burts-... and [2] http://cureresearch4type1diabetes.blogspot.fi/2010/11/snarski-confirms-burts-phase-i-results.html http://cureresearch4type1diabetes.blogspot.fi/2010/11/snarsk...

371 points by yurisagalov 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Sounds like another good reason to consider banking stem cells, as described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11830407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11830407 In this case the article describes using chemotherapy to stimulate generation of stem cells, then scrubbing them of the disease before reintroducing. I have no expertise in this field, but I would think having a bank of healthy stem cells would have simplified the procedure and perhaps improved the likelihood of positive outcomes. @markkat if you're reading this, do you have any comment?

blisterpeanuts 10y ago
In the study, the patients' immune systems were cleansed of the agent or agents that caused the autoimmune response. The agent might be present from birth; no one knows what it is, even today. Thus, unfortunately, banking stem cells and restoring them to the body might have the opposite effect of a cure. If they can figure out how to isolate only the specific agents that trigger the attacks on myelin, that would obviously be a huge step forward.
markkat 10y ago
>I would think having a bank of healthy stem cells would have simplified the procedure and perhaps improved the likelihood of positive outcomes. It is possible, assuming that the banked cells were drawn before progression to a disease state. Here, they used the patient's own cells, which they treated before reintroduction, which strongly suggests there is a state to which they can be reverted. It's reasonable then to assume that at the very least, previously banked cells could be similarly treated before reintroduction, which might be a better starting point. As speculated in the article, those patients that did not respond might have progressed too far for the treatment to work. If so, cells banked years before might be advantageous. Of course, that may not be reason why those patients didn't respond. Much of MS still remains a mystery. Still, these results are very exciting, and add to the growing evidence that bone marrow stem cells have real clinical potential. I'll ask our Chief Science Officer, Dr. Ben Buller, to discuss this trial in our blog: http://foreverlabs.co/blog http://foreverlabs.co/blog He has published work using bone MSCs to reverse demyelination, which occurs in MS. I'm sure he'll have some good perspective.

DrJohanson 10y ago

What is a "MS"?

polard2 10y ago

It's very rarely lethal. That being said, lots of people can die from complications due to MS.

lvs 10y ago

A nice longterm study. However, the fact that they need to specify in the title of this lay article that "this isn't hype" really says it all about science "journalism."

ohthehugemanate 10y ago
Also the fact that if you read the study, it IS hype. (fromory, because I'm mobile) One study, of 24 people. The treatment is only for 5% of MS sufferers, and it's 70% effective at stopping the progress of the disease. Only 3 of the patients in the study had a reversal like the case they describe, so 12%. And the treatment is incredibly rough on the body. One person in this study died from treatment, but almost everyone else suffered at the high end of the scale. The not hype version would be "Potential treatment for 3% of MS patients in extreme risk cases! It even reverses the disease for a lucky handful." It is a bug advance, but... Well this is Vox, after all.
- Houshalter 10y ago
  Well the title wasn't "MS universally cured". It's significant progress towards a cure. And curing 3% of a disease that afflicts millions of people is still tens of thousands of lives saved.
  - RobertoG 10y ago
    And, more interesting, I think, it confirms the theory of what cause the illness. That was not so clear the last time I read about it. That in itself is a big advancement.
- yompers888 10y ago
  Thank you for your diligence.
- namuol 10y ago
  > Only 3 patients in the study had a reversal It was actually 8 of the 24 that saw recovery so that's 33%.

jiang01 10y ago

WORK HARDER FOR THAT LETTER OF RECOMMENDATION, UNPAID PEASANT

purpleidea 10y ago

I believe this might have been the study where 25%(?) of the patients were killed by the treatment. As a result, this is only indicated for the very severe RRMS (relapsing-remitting, not related to Stallman) cases. I'm sure HN can correct me if I'm wrong, but the point to make is that this isn't a cure.

sago 10y ago
Maybe you can read the article and correct yourself? 1/24 patients died during the trial (no causal link was specified), and the treatment was given to progressive MS patients (PPMS or SPMS).

djaychela 10y ago

There was a comment on this on BBC breakfast yesterday, with an MS specialist saying that it was promising, but not up to the hype that people were making over it? He said it was an Avenue to explore further, and looked to be a good technique, but there was a long way to go - he quoted the stats from the study, and certainly seemed to be familiar with it and the methodology used. Can't find a link to it (it was an interview rather than a feature), alas.

cring1 10y ago

Sorry for my ignorance, but how does MS become lethal?

Hondor 10y ago

That all happened 15 years ago. The article mentions that it's available at some hospitals, so that suggests it was ultimately successful and it's now part of regular medicine. I suppose it's still only for 5% of cases and only as a last resort and still most patients aren't having any reversal of their disease. There doesn't sound like much hope for it to expand to cure MS in general given how long it's been with apparently no further progress.

bhouston 10y ago
> still most patients aren't having any reversal of their disease From the article, "70 percent saw the progression of their disease halted or reversed" 70% change of no further progression or even reversal? Those are good odds.
- jacalata 10y ago
  That was patients in the study, the comment was about all patients with MS.
- Hondor 10y ago
  I was just stating the outcome in a more negative way. Most had no reversal but also most didn't get worse either. Because half of that 70% were in the "halted" category which might not be much use if you're already at a late stage of the disease and you were only eligible for this treatment because you were almost dead.
- bshanks 10y ago
  "One patient died, which puts the potential for death from this procedure at around 4 percent, and severe infections after stem cell treatments — the kind Molson picked up, or worse — are also common."

jawns 10y ago

Just in case anyone is wondering -- though at this point, isn't it your first guess? -- the stem cells used in this therapy were adult stem cells, meaning they were collected from her own body, as opposed to embryonic stem cells. I mention it here because the article doesn't give that info until about half-way down.

Teever 10y ago
I don't understand why you felt it necessary to mention this. I think it's half-way down in the article because it's not really the most important aspect of the conversation. I think the fact that MS has been cured in some people for the first time is far more relevant than the source of the stemcells used to cure MS.
- KevanM 10y ago
  Depends how you feel about stem cell research.
  - forthefuture 10y ago
    I long for days when it won't really matter how you feel about stem cell research.
  - dave_sullivan 10y ago
    I feel like it's been held back for a decade or two by, mostly, the religious right, and I wonder how many people's lives are worse off as a result.
    - refurb 10y ago
      Why was it held back? The only legislation passed was around gov't funding of new embyonic stem cell lines. Private money has no restrictions.
    - wtbob 10y ago
      I wonder how many more lives would have been ended had federal dollars funded research using embryonic stem cells.

reasonattlm 10y ago

Publicity materials: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-06/tl-tln060816.php http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-06/tl-tln060816.... Paper: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(16)30169-6/abstract http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67... The latest update for ongoing efforts to test destruction and recreation of the immune system in patients suffering from the autoimmune disease multiple sclerosis demonstrate that this approach is effectively a cure if the initial destruction of immune cells is comprehensive enough. Researchers have been able to suppress or kill much of the immune system and then repopulate it with new cells for about as long as the modern stem cell therapy industry has been underway, something like fifteen years or so. Methodologies have improved, but the destructive side of this process remains unpleasant and risky, something you wouldn't want to try if there was any good alternative. Yet if not for the scientific and commercial success of immunosuppressant biologics such as adalimumab, clearance and recreation of immune cell populations may well have become the major thrust of research for other prevalent autoimmune conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis. Destroying these immune cell populations requires chemotherapy, however, and with avoiding chemotherapy as an incentive for patients, and the ability to sell people drugs for life as an incentive for the medical industry, biologics won. For conditions like rheumatoid arthritis, the aim became control and minimization of symptoms rather than the search for a cure. Only in much more damaging, harmful autoimmune conditions like multiple sclerosis has this research into wiping and rebuilding the immune system continued in any significant way. It is worthy of note that while these trials were only enrolling a small minority of patients, the approach could be used on every patient. That tends to be the way trials work, picking a small subset. The driving factor for keeping the numbers small is the onerous and risky chemotherapy process. Beyond being able to pinpoint which tissues are suffering damage due to inappropriately targeted immune cells, the underlying mechanisms of most autoimmune conditions are very poorly understood. Multiple sclerosis, for example, results from immune cells attacking the myelin sheathing essential for proper nerve function. Collectively, the cells of the immune system maintain a memory of what they intend to target, that much is evident, but the structure and nature of that memory is both very complex and yet to be fully mapped to the level of detail that would allow the many types of autoimmunity to be clearly understood. That these autoimmune conditions are all very different is evidenced from the unpredictable effectiveness of today's immunosuppressant treatments - they work for some people, not so well for others. Many autoimmune diseases may well turn out to be categories of several similar conditions with different roots in different portions of the immune system. Destruction of the immune system offers a way around present ignorance: it is an engineering approach to medicine. If immune cell populations can be removed sufficiently comprehensively, then it doesn't really matter how they are storing the bad data that produces autoimmunity. That data is gone, and won't return when immune cells are restored through cell therapies. The cost of that process today is chemotherapy, which is not to be taken lightly, as the results presented here make clear. A mortality rate of one in twenty is enough to give pause, even if you have multiple sclerosis. In the future, however, much more selective cell destruction mechanisms will be developed, such as some of those emerging from the cancer research community, approaches that will make an immune reboot something that could be undertaken in a clinic with no side-effects rather than in a hospital with all the associated damage of chemotherapy. Autoimmune diseases are far from the only reason we'd want to reboot our immune systems: as we age, the accumulated impact of infections weighs heavily upon the immune system, and its limited capacity fills with uselessly specialized cells rather than those capable of destroying new threats. Failure of the immune response is a large part of age-related frailty, leading to both chronic inflammation and vulnerability to infection, and it is something that could be addressed in large part by an evolution of this approach to autoimmune disease.

wildmXranat 10y ago

I live in Canada. I just listened to one of the participants talk about the experience on the radio and I found it just incredible. In her own words, "She could not feel her body from the neck down. After the long and gruel ordeal procedure, she began to get sensation back. Things like hot and cold water began to be discernible. She no longer needed to hold both railings when walking down stairs in her home, needing a cane to get the mail, etc ..." She said that it gave her her life back. She said that in short time, she began to get bored with doing the regular, tired routine and actually got a part-time job. I mean, all that sounds phenomenal.

cpncrunch 10y ago
It does sound phenomenal, but bear in mind there was no placebo control, so we don't know how much of the effect was due to the placebo effect. Generally the placebo effect will vary depending on the type of intervention. A very novel and invasive intervention like this will have a high placebo effect. Remember Liberation Therapy? Given that psychological treatment alone can reduce the fatigue in MS to below that of healthy controls (van Kessel 2008), it's likely that the placebo effect plays a large role. (The placebo effect will also affect pain, weakness and numbness, as the part of the brain that produces fatigue - the anterior cingulate cortex and insular cortex - also produces those symptoms).
- zxv 10y ago
  Hang on a minute. Placebo effect does not explain regaining sensation, nor regaining ability walking.
  - patall 10y ago
    That's exactly the placebo effect. You think that you get a treatment and your body reacts to that
  - jMyles 10y ago
    For the purposes of clinical trials, are there any conditions that are excluded as possible placebo effects?

BurningFrog 10y ago

This is the tech support approach to the immune system: Try turning it off and on again.

YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
A corollary of which is that the immune system runs on MS Windows.
- dclowd9901 10y ago
  Given its baffling nature, I'd say that's a pretty apt comparison.

thatha7777 10y ago

Does this teach us anything about the causes of MS, and potentially inform on preventative measures?

xor_null 10y ago

Quite interesting. But something i don't understand, MS causes immune cells to attack the myelin cells. Depending on the severe of the attack the myelin cells are completly destroyed or even the nerv cells themselves are destroyed. Recreating the immun cells would prevent the immun cells from attacking the myelin cells, but what happens to the tissues which are already destroyed? As far as i know, the body is not able to repair all kind of destroyed nerv cells / myelin cells on his own. So how can this treatment help to repair/recover already destroyed tissue?

hvs 10y ago

A similar (smaller) study was done back in 2003 with Crohn's disease. The results were similar. http://www.nature.com/bmt/journal/v32/n1s/full/1703945a.html http://www.nature.com/bmt/journal/v32/n1s/full/1703945a.html A more recent, better controlled study found very little difference between traditional treatment, though. http://www.news-medical.net/news/20151218/Stem-cell-therapy-not-significantly-better-than-conventional-treatment-for-Crohns-disease.aspx http://www.news-medical.net/news/20151218/Stem-cell-therapy-...

jeroen 10y ago

> And there are questions about the very long-term effects. It’s not clear what the next 10, 20, or 50 years look like for patients like Molson. Does that even matter? Molson would probably be dead right now if it weren't for the treatment, not to mention an enormous increase in quality of life. Even if the treatment kills her in 10 years, she will have had 25 years of a proper life, versus a few more years of lying in bed. Of course long term effects are interesting to study and see if there is room for improvement, but I don't see them impact the validity of the treatment.

indymike 10y ago

My Dad had MS and died earlier this year of pneumonia. MS is a horrible disease in every way. It's debilitating, humiliating, and painful. Hopefully this study can be repeated. So many studies using whatever is the trendy science of the day end up failing. This study looks hopeful and could be life changing in the best way possible. But it's not the first study that has started with an amazing result.

kakoni 10y ago

Related; Type 1 diabetes being also auto-immune disease. There have been now atleast 2 groups that have succesfully done "cure" using same kind of immune system reboot strategy. few interesting links; [1] http://cureresearch4type1diabetes.blogspot.fi/2008/12/burts-brazilian-research.html http://cureresearch4type1diabetes.blogspot.fi/2008/12/burts-... and [2] http://cureresearch4type1diabetes.blogspot.fi/2010/11/snarski-confirms-burts-phase-i-results.html http://cureresearch4type1diabetes.blogspot.fi/2010/11/snarsk...