24 ms·

Paralyzed man regains use of arms and hands after experimental stem cell therapy

873 points by jpgvm 10y ago

startupdiscuss 10y ago
Despite all the cynicism, there are still wonderful things about good old medicine and science. 90 days! Paralysis to utility! Is someone going to tell me something like: oh, the nerve wasn't completely severed so recovery might have happened anyway? Well, go ahead, but in the meantime I am enjoying this news.
- jpgvm 10y ago
  There has been a lot of uplifting news coming out of stem cell and gene therapy the last couple of days. :)
  - gtaylor 10y ago
    Even if this is but one small step towards wider treatment, this is worth taking a moment to be happy and thankful for. You know that this patient is!
- hdivider 10y ago
  Well said. HN often tends toward cynicism and nitpicking. But this result can act a sign of hope for countless paralyzed people. Good news -- pure and simple. :)
overcast 10y ago
It's exciting to know that paralysis will be a thing of the past in potentially our near future. Deafness/Blindness/Cancer/etc all benefits from these studies.
rudolf0 10y ago
Could stem cell therapy be used to potentially improve existing muscular or neurological connections in normally functioning individuals? Kind of like a whole-body neurotropic.
- alextheparrot 10y ago
  I think that's not currently clear, I'd expect technologies such as CRISPR to have a far greater impact on enhancement of "normal" honestly. Some brain diseases are caused by the overriding of nuerons, so more is not necessararily better, for example.
rce123 10y ago
After an accident such as this, is there a point at which it's too late to perform this type of injection? Asking for someone in a similar situation.
- givinguflac 10y ago
  The article says that this study requires the patient to be stable enough for an injection 13-14 days post-injury. That's not to say we know it wouldn't help, but that's what this study is looking for.
DamnInteresting 10y ago
Note that this was published several months ago, in September 2016. So if this news sounds familiar, that's probably why.
obeone 10y ago
Here is the December 14 2016 update to that story: http://keck.usc.edu/stem-cell-therapy-gives-paralyzed-man-second-chance-at-independence/ http://keck.usc.edu/stem-cell-therapy-gives-paralyzed-man-se...
- justinclift 10y ago
  And further information from a few days ago: https://blog.cirm.ca.gov/2017/01/25/good-news-from-asterias-cirm-funded-spinal-cord-injury-trial/ https://blog.cirm.ca.gov/2017/01/25/good-news-from-asterias-... Looks like a second group of people is getting treatment with a higher dosage. The results of that will definitely be of interest to many. :)
neuronexmachina 10y ago
Given that their methodology uses embryonic stem cells, it'll be interesting to see how this plays out in the US with opponent Tom Price as head of Health & Human Services. > The stem cell procedure Kris received is part of a Phase 1/2a clinical trial that is evaluating the safety and efficacy of escalating doses of AST-OPC1 cells developed by Fremont, California-based Asterias Biotherapeutics. AST-OPC1 cells are made from embryonic stem cells by carefully converting them into oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (OPCs), which are cells found in the brain and spinal cord that support the healthy functioning of nerve cells. In previous laboratory studies, AST-OPC1 was shown to produce neurotrophic factors, stimulate vascularization and induce remyelination of denuded axons. All are critical factors in the survival, regrowth and conduction of nerve impulses through axons at the injury site, according to Edward D. Wirth III, MD, PhD, chief medical director of Asterias and lead investigator of the study, dubbed “SCiStar.”
- jpgvm 10y ago
  Thankfully there is still Canada/EU/Australia on the cutting edge of stem cell and gene therapies. That said the Trump administration is likely to be a great blow to science overall, to be felt worldwide I would imagine.
  - gtaylor 10y ago
    This may be a bleak way to look at things, but the money the rest of the world will start making with this in the future will ensure that we eventually come around. Money wins over morals and ethics much of the time.
    - gtaylor 10y ago
      Not to say that this research isn't ethical or moral. More that we'll eventually benefit from this.
      - komali2 10y ago
        Generally the well-educated believe it is ethical and moral research, but there's a vast swath of America that believe that it is unethical, either from a misunderstanding of how the research is done, or simply from a total moral objection to the research at all. So you're right, but it's still an issue until we can solve the misinformation problem.
uptownfunk 10y ago
Is there a greatly increased risk for cancer from stem cell use given these are cells that have a high rate of proliferation?
- anigbrowl 10y ago
  Maybe, but for most people cancer in the future vs being dead or paralyzed now is an easy decision. I'm not aware of such an elevated risk, just saying that it would be an acceptable trade-off in many circumstances.
  - sambe 10y ago
    The follow-up article mentioned by another poster (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13494463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13494463) mentions cancer as a risk of the treatment.
pdimitar 10y ago
Can somebody explain the stem cell therapy to a complete laic like myself? I don't mean links to science articles, I mean a description you would attempt projecting at me if we were having a beer. For me the stem cells are some sort of a magical Wolverine regeneration sauce. Never understood why they even work.
- thomnottom 10y ago
  From my understanding, stem cells are like cells that have not picked a specialty yet. So they can become the cells necessary to repair a damaged area once they are introduced.
- ChrisClark 10y ago
  As a computer scientist, I have no expertise in it. But my understanding is that a stem cell is an 'undifferentiated' cell. It hasn't been 'programmed' yet, to tell it what it should grow into. And as such, can grow into any type of cell in our body. I just don't know how we actually tell it what to grow into. For instance, as an embryo, you start as a single cell, it divides, eventually some of those cells need to start specializing, but until then they all have the potential to be any type.
- anigbrowl 10y ago
  They are some sort of magical wolverine regeneration source. When you have a fertilized egg the first thing it does is start multiplying. But once you have a little cluster of cells they start making decisions (using bits of DNA to communicate) about what they should turn into - a skin cell, a bone cell, a brain cell or whatever. The trick with stem cells is to harvest them and keep them on ice just before they start making decisions. Then you transplant them into an injured body and they're all like 'hey ho, looks like I'm surrounded by nerve cells here so I'm gonna be a nerve cell too' (if you injected them into a spinal column) or 'woot, looks like I'm in a community of liver cells, I'm gonna turn myself into a liver cell' etc. etc. The biggest problem is that you'd like a whole tank of stem cells that you could dip some injured person into and have them come out fully repaired, but getting stem cells to multiply without turning into anything in particular is a challenge so we have to cultivate them in very small quantities and it's relatively slow and expensive to do that. I'll have a pilsener, please.
keeganjw 10y ago
Congrats! I feel so happy for this guy. Awesome news!
Xcelerate 10y ago
This is very exciting. This type of work can even benefit people who aren't paralyzed — damaged cartilage can also be repaired this way. When I ran track in college, I somehow developed focal cartilage defects in both knees. This brought my running career to a halt and made walking extremely painful for about a year. In an attempt to fix this, I had a type of surgery known as the OATS procedure performed. This is where the surgeon takes a plug of undamaged articular cartilage from a low load bearing region of the knee and swaps it with the damaged cartilage. Walking is mostly pain-free for me now, but it still hurts too much if I attempt to run. As though one cartilage injury weren't enough, I somewhat stupidly decided to take up weight lifting after I couldn't run anymore and attempted to set down a barbell that was way too heavy for me. In doing so, I triggered a mild lower lumbar disc herniation. So now I have two permanent injuries. Luckily, neither injury is very severe, so some days I don't even notice the pain while other days it approaches mildly annoying "background noise". These types of cartilage injuries are common, and arthritis is even more common. But the issue with cartilage is that once it's damaged, it doesn't heal on its own because cartilage has no vascular system. You can break all the bones you want and eventually they will heal, but damaged hyaline cartilage will not. The best that your body can do is to produce "low-quality" fibrocartilage in place of the damaged hyaline cartilage. Fortunately, there's been a lot of research over the last decade on using mesenchymal stem cells (taken from your own bone marrow) to regrow true hyaline cartilage as opposed to fibrocartilage. The stem cells have actually been shown to differentiate into hyaline cartilage. For me, this has the potential to permanently alleviate both knee and back pain. Moving this research away from clinical trials seems to be taking forever for some reason though...
- xahrepap 10y ago
  It's interesting. I was just consulting with a new doctor yesterday about my back pain. We went off on a tangent and he was telling me he knee was so bad with cartilage damage that it would hurt for over a month, leaving him limping, after attempting to run or play sports. He did some stem cell injections in his knee and it's all better now. Not sure how long ago he did that. It's really cool technology. I can't wait to see where it goes in the next few years!
cpncrunch 10y ago
It says it is a clinical trial, but I can't find the actual study, only another press release: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160914095610.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160914095610.h... We really need to wait until the clinical trial publishes its results to know whether or not the treatment works. This person might have recovered naturally without any treatment.
- Brakenshire 10y ago
  It looks like a randomized trial hasn't started yet.
  - cpncrunch 10y ago
    Are you sure? It says "The first early data results from a group of patients in this study will become available on September 14, 2016."
narrator 10y ago
Meanwhile, 9 years ago in China, people were already receiving this kind of therapy, but nobody believed them[1]. As Gibson has said, "The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed." [1]https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/k1hts/i_am_a_28yr_old_american_who_went_to_china_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/k1hts/i_am_a_28yr_old...
- anjc 10y ago
  It's crazy how arrogant a little knowledge can make some people, as seen in that Reddit thread.
  - chc 10y ago
    I don't think wanting reasonable evidence before believing that a medical procedure works and works safely is the same thing as arrogance.
    - anjc 10y ago
      Yeah, wanting reasonable evidence before believing in the casual relationship between two events is fair. But in this case, the Redditor can't provide scientific proof, because he's a layman. What he can provide is evidence that he couldn't walk, received stem cell treatment, and then could walk. 90% of the top level comments effectively said "No, impossible, there must be some other reason that you can now walk". That is to say, they feel that because there's no evidence that it's possible, it's impossible until scientists prove that it is possible. Well no, that doesn't make sense and it isn't usually how things work. These people's small amount of knowledge of the scientific method has caused them to arrogantly discredit potentially real phenomenon. What's interesting is that one of the main top level comments which says "wow, I had a feeling this would be possible" is from an actual stem cell researcher.
      - chc 10y ago
        I looked at that thread, and the non-negative-score comments seem to range from credulous to reasonably skeptical, with none that are fairly characterized as "No, impossible!" In fact, given how sketchy the poster of that thread was being (e.g. linking to his non-medical blog when asked for medical details and saying he's too embarrassed to talk about it when asked again), I'd say people were pretty generous.
willholloway 10y ago
Stem cells are showing more and more promise. One thing we know about them is that young stem cells are better than old ones. I think there is a lot of promise in stem cell banking. I haven't pulled the trigger yet, but do plan on banking my own stem cells while I'm in my early 30's because parts of me will inevitably start to break down in the coming decades, and I really like the idea of tapping my own young cells when I am old to heal some of that. The only company I know of that is doing this is Forever Labs, https://www.foreverlabs.co/ https://www.foreverlabs.co/, I am not associated with them, I just think they are on the right track with stem-cell banking and have spoken to one of the founders and was pretty excited about what they were doing and think its something worth supporting, which is why I'm writing this comment.
- ahallock 10y ago
  Thanks for this. I had no idea that young cells were better, even if that may seem obvious. I had to dig, but the price is $7000 for the procedure and lifetime storage or $3500 and then $250 per year for storage. Maybe competition in this could reduce the storage costs.
  - tempestn 10y ago
    Ya, it is a bit steep. I'd love to see more options for this as well (especially here in Canada, where I don't believe there are any yet...)
  - lisivka 10y ago
    In my country it costs about $1000 for procedure and $200 per year for storage, so it's very unlikely for storage to be much cheaper than now.
- piercebot 10y ago
  We banked the embryonic stem cells and cord blood from our child's umbilical cord. There are a few companies that offer these services; we went with CryoCell (no affiliation).
- josephagoss 10y ago
avenoir 10y ago
I believe the same article was already posted here a few months back. Regardless, it would be interesting to know how much functionality this young man will gain after his rehabilitation. Stuff like this is hard to believe to be 100% effective, at least at this stage of our understanding and use of stem cells. But man this is absolutely astounding if it helps him regain even like 30% of his limbs.
warcher 10y ago
One really important caveat here-- nature abhors a vacuum, and spinal cord injuries are no exception. A chronic injury to the spinal column will result in scar tissue coming in over the wound, which is a totally separate issue from the initial injury. If your spinal cord injury is over a month old, you have a completely separate problem, ie, how to clear out the scar tissue so that nerve regeneration is even possible.
tokenadult 10y ago
The patient's age being twenty-one may have made a difference in this happy news story. My dad had a slip and fall on ice at age seventy-two that left him paralyzed from the chin down until he died six years later. He had had a similar injury from a car crash (back when cars didn't have seat belts) at age eighteen, from which he recovered fully (although he wasn't so paralyzed from the first injury). So when he had his second injury, he at first thought he would also recover from that injury. Maybe because the second injury aggravated damage to his spine still remaining from his first injury, or maybe just because he was a lot older when injured the second time, he never recovered much at all from the second injury. His experience reminds me how many other people in a family are affected by spinal cord injuries, and thus how important it is to find better treatments for them. So it's hard to say how wide a range of patients will be treatable with the new technique, but that's what medical research is for: to find out what helps for which patients. I hope further research continues on this and other treatments for spinal cord injuries.
martyvis 10y ago
The Australian of the Year (just announced yesterday, January 26th being our national day), was Emeritus Professor Alan Mackay-Sim http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-01-26/the-amazing-work-of-professor-alan-mackay-sim/8214882 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-01-26/the-amazing-work-of-pr... He performed pioneering work taking a type of adult stem cell from the nose and showing how it can be be used for spinal repair. A polish paraplegic, Darek Fidyka, regained the ability to walk following surgery in 2014 using this research findings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darek_Fidyka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darek_Fidyka
- akandiah 10y ago
  The paraplegic in question can now ride a bike! http://www.bbc.com/news/health-35660621 http://www.bbc.com/news/health-35660621
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - drcross 10y ago
    The former paraplegic in question can now ride a bike! http://www.bbc.com/news/health-35660621 http://www.bbc.com/news/health-35660621 FIFY
- lawless123 10y ago
  The ones mentioned in the article seem to be embryonic stem cells.
thomyorkie 10y ago
Could this possibly lead to a cure for neuro-degenerative diseases like parkinson's and ALS?
mercurialshark 10y ago
I remember an earlier article highlighting the potential benefits of olfactory stem cells for damaged brain tissue repair. Engraftment of human nasal olfactory stem cells restores neuroplasticity in mice with hippocampal lesions https://www.jci.org/articles/view/44489 https://www.jci.org/articles/view/44489
bexp 10y ago
Short Summary by http://hn10.org http://hn10.org : Parents Rodney and Annette Boesen were warned there was a good chance their son would be permanently paralyzed from the neck down. “With this study, we are testing a procedure that may improve neurological function, which could mean the difference between being permanently paralyzed and being able to use one’s arms and hands. In early April, a surgical team from Keck Hospital of USC carefully injected 10 million AST-OPC1 cells directly into Kris’ cervical spine. “The people at Keck Medical Center of USC and elsewhere moved heaven and earth to get things done. The first early data results from a group of patients in this study will become available on September 14, 2016.
toodlebunions 10y ago
Amazing, stem cell therapy has so much potential.
aphextron 10y ago
I know that directly correlating a recovery with a specific therapy is really hard to do. There have been many stem cell studies like this in the past which have shown similar seemingly miraculous results, even though it's not entirely certain whether the patient would have recovered otherwise or if something else was responsible. Paralyzed people inexplicably regain motor control all the time. I'd be curious to know how rigorous the study was in regards to control.
MR4D 10y ago
Odd comment - what's neat to me about this article on HN is that nobody has said "clickbait" or misleading title. That this kind of title can represent reality shows what amazing times we live in. The level of medical awesomeness is off the charts - so many people can now start to hope for not just a better life, but a radically better life.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

873 points by jpgvm 10y ago

Despite all the cynicism, there are still wonderful things about good old medicine and science. 90 days! Paralysis to utility! Is someone going to tell me something like: oh, the nerve wasn't completely severed so recovery might have happened anyway? Well, go ahead, but in the meantime I am enjoying this news.

jpgvm 10y ago
There has been a lot of uplifting news coming out of stem cell and gene therapy the last couple of days. :)
- gtaylor 10y ago
  Even if this is but one small step towards wider treatment, this is worth taking a moment to be happy and thankful for. You know that this patient is!
hdivider 10y ago
Well said. HN often tends toward cynicism and nitpicking. But this result can act a sign of hope for countless paralyzed people. Good news -- pure and simple. :)

overcast 10y ago

It's exciting to know that paralysis will be a thing of the past in potentially our near future. Deafness/Blindness/Cancer/etc all benefits from these studies.

rudolf0 10y ago

Could stem cell therapy be used to potentially improve existing muscular or neurological connections in normally functioning individuals? Kind of like a whole-body neurotropic.

alextheparrot 10y ago
I think that's not currently clear, I'd expect technologies such as CRISPR to have a far greater impact on enhancement of "normal" honestly. Some brain diseases are caused by the overriding of nuerons, so more is not necessararily better, for example.

rce123 10y ago

After an accident such as this, is there a point at which it's too late to perform this type of injection? Asking for someone in a similar situation.

givinguflac 10y ago
The article says that this study requires the patient to be stable enough for an injection 13-14 days post-injury. That's not to say we know it wouldn't help, but that's what this study is looking for.

DamnInteresting 10y ago

Note that this was published several months ago, in September 2016. So if this news sounds familiar, that's probably why.

obeone 10y ago

Here is the December 14 2016 update to that story: http://keck.usc.edu/stem-cell-therapy-gives-paralyzed-man-second-chance-at-independence/ http://keck.usc.edu/stem-cell-therapy-gives-paralyzed-man-se...

justinclift 10y ago
And further information from a few days ago: https://blog.cirm.ca.gov/2017/01/25/good-news-from-asterias-cirm-funded-spinal-cord-injury-trial/ https://blog.cirm.ca.gov/2017/01/25/good-news-from-asterias-... Looks like a second group of people is getting treatment with a higher dosage. The results of that will definitely be of interest to many. :)

neuronexmachina 10y ago

Given that their methodology uses embryonic stem cells, it'll be interesting to see how this plays out in the US with opponent Tom Price as head of Health & Human Services. > The stem cell procedure Kris received is part of a Phase 1/2a clinical trial that is evaluating the safety and efficacy of escalating doses of AST-OPC1 cells developed by Fremont, California-based Asterias Biotherapeutics. AST-OPC1 cells are made from embryonic stem cells by carefully converting them into oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (OPCs), which are cells found in the brain and spinal cord that support the healthy functioning of nerve cells. In previous laboratory studies, AST-OPC1 was shown to produce neurotrophic factors, stimulate vascularization and induce remyelination of denuded axons. All are critical factors in the survival, regrowth and conduction of nerve impulses through axons at the injury site, according to Edward D. Wirth III, MD, PhD, chief medical director of Asterias and lead investigator of the study, dubbed “SCiStar.”

jpgvm 10y ago
Thankfully there is still Canada/EU/Australia on the cutting edge of stem cell and gene therapies. That said the Trump administration is likely to be a great blow to science overall, to be felt worldwide I would imagine.
- gtaylor 10y ago
  This may be a bleak way to look at things, but the money the rest of the world will start making with this in the future will ensure that we eventually come around. Money wins over morals and ethics much of the time.
  - gtaylor 10y ago
    Not to say that this research isn't ethical or moral. More that we'll eventually benefit from this.
    - komali2 10y ago
      Generally the well-educated believe it is ethical and moral research, but there's a vast swath of America that believe that it is unethical, either from a misunderstanding of how the research is done, or simply from a total moral objection to the research at all. So you're right, but it's still an issue until we can solve the misinformation problem.

uptownfunk 10y ago

Is there a greatly increased risk for cancer from stem cell use given these are cells that have a high rate of proliferation?

anigbrowl 10y ago
Maybe, but for most people cancer in the future vs being dead or paralyzed now is an easy decision. I'm not aware of such an elevated risk, just saying that it would be an acceptable trade-off in many circumstances.
- sambe 10y ago
  The follow-up article mentioned by another poster (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13494463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13494463) mentions cancer as a risk of the treatment.

pdimitar 10y ago

Can somebody explain the stem cell therapy to a complete laic like myself? I don't mean links to science articles, I mean a description you would attempt projecting at me if we were having a beer. For me the stem cells are some sort of a magical Wolverine regeneration sauce. Never understood why they even work.

thomnottom 10y ago
From my understanding, stem cells are like cells that have not picked a specialty yet. So they can become the cells necessary to repair a damaged area once they are introduced.
ChrisClark 10y ago
As a computer scientist, I have no expertise in it. But my understanding is that a stem cell is an 'undifferentiated' cell. It hasn't been 'programmed' yet, to tell it what it should grow into. And as such, can grow into any type of cell in our body. I just don't know how we actually tell it what to grow into. For instance, as an embryo, you start as a single cell, it divides, eventually some of those cells need to start specializing, but until then they all have the potential to be any type.
anigbrowl 10y ago
They are some sort of magical wolverine regeneration source. When you have a fertilized egg the first thing it does is start multiplying. But once you have a little cluster of cells they start making decisions (using bits of DNA to communicate) about what they should turn into - a skin cell, a bone cell, a brain cell or whatever. The trick with stem cells is to harvest them and keep them on ice just before they start making decisions. Then you transplant them into an injured body and they're all like 'hey ho, looks like I'm surrounded by nerve cells here so I'm gonna be a nerve cell too' (if you injected them into a spinal column) or 'woot, looks like I'm in a community of liver cells, I'm gonna turn myself into a liver cell' etc. etc. The biggest problem is that you'd like a whole tank of stem cells that you could dip some injured person into and have them come out fully repaired, but getting stem cells to multiply without turning into anything in particular is a challenge so we have to cultivate them in very small quantities and it's relatively slow and expensive to do that. I'll have a pilsener, please.

keeganjw 10y ago

Congrats! I feel so happy for this guy. Awesome news!

Xcelerate 10y ago

This is very exciting. This type of work can even benefit people who aren't paralyzed — damaged cartilage can also be repaired this way. When I ran track in college, I somehow developed focal cartilage defects in both knees. This brought my running career to a halt and made walking extremely painful for about a year. In an attempt to fix this, I had a type of surgery known as the OATS procedure performed. This is where the surgeon takes a plug of undamaged articular cartilage from a low load bearing region of the knee and swaps it with the damaged cartilage. Walking is mostly pain-free for me now, but it still hurts too much if I attempt to run. As though one cartilage injury weren't enough, I somewhat stupidly decided to take up weight lifting after I couldn't run anymore and attempted to set down a barbell that was way too heavy for me. In doing so, I triggered a mild lower lumbar disc herniation. So now I have two permanent injuries. Luckily, neither injury is very severe, so some days I don't even notice the pain while other days it approaches mildly annoying "background noise". These types of cartilage injuries are common, and arthritis is even more common. But the issue with cartilage is that once it's damaged, it doesn't heal on its own because cartilage has no vascular system. You can break all the bones you want and eventually they will heal, but damaged hyaline cartilage will not. The best that your body can do is to produce "low-quality" fibrocartilage in place of the damaged hyaline cartilage. Fortunately, there's been a lot of research over the last decade on using mesenchymal stem cells (taken from your own bone marrow) to regrow true hyaline cartilage as opposed to fibrocartilage. The stem cells have actually been shown to differentiate into hyaline cartilage. For me, this has the potential to permanently alleviate both knee and back pain. Moving this research away from clinical trials seems to be taking forever for some reason though...

xahrepap 10y ago
It's interesting. I was just consulting with a new doctor yesterday about my back pain. We went off on a tangent and he was telling me he knee was so bad with cartilage damage that it would hurt for over a month, leaving him limping, after attempting to run or play sports. He did some stem cell injections in his knee and it's all better now. Not sure how long ago he did that. It's really cool technology. I can't wait to see where it goes in the next few years!

cpncrunch 10y ago

It says it is a clinical trial, but I can't find the actual study, only another press release: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160914095610.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160914095610.h... We really need to wait until the clinical trial publishes its results to know whether or not the treatment works. This person might have recovered naturally without any treatment.

Brakenshire 10y ago
It looks like a randomized trial hasn't started yet.
- cpncrunch 10y ago
  Are you sure? It says "The first early data results from a group of patients in this study will become available on September 14, 2016."

narrator 10y ago

Meanwhile, 9 years ago in China, people were already receiving this kind of therapy, but nobody believed them[1]. As Gibson has said, "The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed." [1]https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/k1hts/i_am_a_28yr_old_american_who_went_to_china_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/k1hts/i_am_a_28yr_old...

anjc 10y ago
It's crazy how arrogant a little knowledge can make some people, as seen in that Reddit thread.
- chc 10y ago
  I don't think wanting reasonable evidence before believing that a medical procedure works and works safely is the same thing as arrogance.
  - anjc 10y ago
    Yeah, wanting reasonable evidence before believing in the casual relationship between two events is fair. But in this case, the Redditor can't provide scientific proof, because he's a layman. What he can provide is evidence that he couldn't walk, received stem cell treatment, and then could walk. 90% of the top level comments effectively said "No, impossible, there must be some other reason that you can now walk". That is to say, they feel that because there's no evidence that it's possible, it's impossible until scientists prove that it is possible. Well no, that doesn't make sense and it isn't usually how things work. These people's small amount of knowledge of the scientific method has caused them to arrogantly discredit potentially real phenomenon. What's interesting is that one of the main top level comments which says "wow, I had a feeling this would be possible" is from an actual stem cell researcher.
    - chc 10y ago
      I looked at that thread, and the non-negative-score comments seem to range from credulous to reasonably skeptical, with none that are fairly characterized as "No, impossible!" In fact, given how sketchy the poster of that thread was being (e.g. linking to his non-medical blog when asked for medical details and saying he's too embarrassed to talk about it when asked again), I'd say people were pretty generous.

willholloway 10y ago

Stem cells are showing more and more promise. One thing we know about them is that young stem cells are better than old ones. I think there is a lot of promise in stem cell banking. I haven't pulled the trigger yet, but do plan on banking my own stem cells while I'm in my early 30's because parts of me will inevitably start to break down in the coming decades, and I really like the idea of tapping my own young cells when I am old to heal some of that. The only company I know of that is doing this is Forever Labs, https://www.foreverlabs.co/ https://www.foreverlabs.co/, I am not associated with them, I just think they are on the right track with stem-cell banking and have spoken to one of the founders and was pretty excited about what they were doing and think its something worth supporting, which is why I'm writing this comment.

ahallock 10y ago
Thanks for this. I had no idea that young cells were better, even if that may seem obvious. I had to dig, but the price is $7000 for the procedure and lifetime storage or $3500 and then $250 per year for storage. Maybe competition in this could reduce the storage costs.
- tempestn 10y ago
  Ya, it is a bit steep. I'd love to see more options for this as well (especially here in Canada, where I don't believe there are any yet...)
- lisivka 10y ago
  In my country it costs about $1000 for procedure and $200 per year for storage, so it's very unlikely for storage to be much cheaper than now.
piercebot 10y ago
We banked the embryonic stem cells and cord blood from our child's umbilical cord. There are a few companies that offer these services; we went with CryoCell (no affiliation).
josephagoss 10y ago

avenoir 10y ago

I believe the same article was already posted here a few months back. Regardless, it would be interesting to know how much functionality this young man will gain after his rehabilitation. Stuff like this is hard to believe to be 100% effective, at least at this stage of our understanding and use of stem cells. But man this is absolutely astounding if it helps him regain even like 30% of his limbs.

warcher 10y ago

One really important caveat here-- nature abhors a vacuum, and spinal cord injuries are no exception. A chronic injury to the spinal column will result in scar tissue coming in over the wound, which is a totally separate issue from the initial injury. If your spinal cord injury is over a month old, you have a completely separate problem, ie, how to clear out the scar tissue so that nerve regeneration is even possible.

tokenadult 10y ago

The patient's age being twenty-one may have made a difference in this happy news story. My dad had a slip and fall on ice at age seventy-two that left him paralyzed from the chin down until he died six years later. He had had a similar injury from a car crash (back when cars didn't have seat belts) at age eighteen, from which he recovered fully (although he wasn't so paralyzed from the first injury). So when he had his second injury, he at first thought he would also recover from that injury. Maybe because the second injury aggravated damage to his spine still remaining from his first injury, or maybe just because he was a lot older when injured the second time, he never recovered much at all from the second injury. His experience reminds me how many other people in a family are affected by spinal cord injuries, and thus how important it is to find better treatments for them. So it's hard to say how wide a range of patients will be treatable with the new technique, but that's what medical research is for: to find out what helps for which patients. I hope further research continues on this and other treatments for spinal cord injuries.

martyvis 10y ago

The Australian of the Year (just announced yesterday, January 26th being our national day), was Emeritus Professor Alan Mackay-Sim http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-01-26/the-amazing-work-of-professor-alan-mackay-sim/8214882 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-01-26/the-amazing-work-of-pr... He performed pioneering work taking a type of adult stem cell from the nose and showing how it can be be used for spinal repair. A polish paraplegic, Darek Fidyka, regained the ability to walk following surgery in 2014 using this research findings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darek_Fidyka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darek_Fidyka

akandiah 10y ago
The paraplegic in question can now ride a bike! http://www.bbc.com/news/health-35660621 http://www.bbc.com/news/health-35660621
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- drcross 10y ago
  The former paraplegic in question can now ride a bike! http://www.bbc.com/news/health-35660621 http://www.bbc.com/news/health-35660621 FIFY
lawless123 10y ago
The ones mentioned in the article seem to be embryonic stem cells.

thomyorkie 10y ago

Could this possibly lead to a cure for neuro-degenerative diseases like parkinson's and ALS?

mercurialshark 10y ago

I remember an earlier article highlighting the potential benefits of olfactory stem cells for damaged brain tissue repair. Engraftment of human nasal olfactory stem cells restores neuroplasticity in mice with hippocampal lesions https://www.jci.org/articles/view/44489 https://www.jci.org/articles/view/44489

bexp 10y ago

Short Summary by http://hn10.org http://hn10.org : Parents Rodney and Annette Boesen were warned there was a good chance their son would be permanently paralyzed from the neck down. “With this study, we are testing a procedure that may improve neurological function, which could mean the difference between being permanently paralyzed and being able to use one’s arms and hands. In early April, a surgical team from Keck Hospital of USC carefully injected 10 million AST-OPC1 cells directly into Kris’ cervical spine. “The people at Keck Medical Center of USC and elsewhere moved heaven and earth to get things done. The first early data results from a group of patients in this study will become available on September 14, 2016.

toodlebunions 10y ago

Amazing, stem cell therapy has so much potential.

aphextron 10y ago

I know that directly correlating a recovery with a specific therapy is really hard to do. There have been many stem cell studies like this in the past which have shown similar seemingly miraculous results, even though it's not entirely certain whether the patient would have recovered otherwise or if something else was responsible. Paralyzed people inexplicably regain motor control all the time. I'd be curious to know how rigorous the study was in regards to control.

MR4D 10y ago

Odd comment - what's neat to me about this article on HN is that nobody has said "clickbait" or misleading title. That this kind of title can represent reality shows what amazing times we live in. The level of medical awesomeness is off the charts - so many people can now start to hope for not just a better life, but a radically better life.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]