Hope for stroke victims

Brain cell transplants could be a promising stroke treatment

PITTSBURGH (CNN) -- Transplanting neural cells grown in a laboratory into the brains of stroke patients appears to be safe, and may help the patients regain mobility, according to a new study.

More testing is necessary before researchers know whether the treatment is truly effective in helping to reverse the paralysis and other impairments characteristic of stroke, but preliminary results are encouraging, lead study author Dr. Douglas Kondziolka said.

"Right now there is no direct treatment for reversing the neurologic damage of a stroke months after it occurs," said Kondziolka, professor of neurological surgery and radiation oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. "The only treatment for these patients is rehabilitation through physical or occupational therapy."

	VIDEO
CNN's Jonathan Aiken looks at the procedure Play video (QuickTime, Real or Windows Media)

Stroke victim Elizabeth Page, 32, finds the results exciting.

"If they can get it to work, I think it will be wonderful," said Page, a Washington, D.C., bus driver. "Especially for people like myself who are used to working every day and athletics and things like that -- just everyday life."

For now, however, Page's best bet remains physical therapy.

"It's just like your limbs are just there and that's it," she said. "They won't move. You're looking at them like 'Come on, move' -- I'm telling my leg to move -- and it won't move."

Kondziolka and his colleagues followed 12 patients like Page who had major problems with movement after experiencing a stroke -- some as much as six years prior to the study period. Six months after receiving transplants of 2 million or 6 million cells called LBS-Neurons, none of the patients developed transplant-related problems or complications.

"This study was designed to evaluate if it's feasible to put these cells into the brain and whether the process is safe," said Kondziolka. "With these positive results, now we can move on to a larger study with more patients to find out whether these transplants really help patients recover their lost abilities."

LBS-Neurons are grown from human tumor tissue that is made up of embryonic-like cells. In a lab, the cells were triggered to become neurons. These cells were than transplanted into three sites within and adjacent to the stroke-damaged areas of the study participants' brains.

Six of the patients showed substantial improvement in various motor-skills tests. In addition, diagnostic imaging using positron emission tomography, an imaging technique that maps both brain structure and activity, revealed measurable metabolic improvement. This suggests that the transplanted cells may be joining with other native brain tissue to function more normally, researchers said.

"We can't draw any conclusions about the effectiveness of this therapy due to the small number of patients involved in this study," Kondziolka said. "But there were some trends indicating the patients were improving."

Approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is necessary before scientists can begin studies on the effectiveness of the transplant treatment.

"We're very encouraged to move ahead with a more ambitious second study," Kondziolka said.

Results of Kondziolka's study are being published in this week's issue of Neurology, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

Writing in an accompanying editorial, Dr. Justin Zivin of the University of California in San Diego urged caution.

"To be able to produce some degree of recovery years after a stroke would be a remarkable achievement," Zivin wrote. "But it's too soon to know whether these transplants promise hope for patients disabled with stroke."

The study was funded by Layton BioScience Inc., the Atherton, California-based company that produces LBS-Neurons.

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American Academy of Neurology
Department of Neurosurgery, University of Pittsburgh
American Stroke Association

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