Could Blood Stem Cells Help MS Patients?

By: Rhonda Craig, American Health Correspondent

(American Health Newswire) --There may be new hope for some multiple sclerosis patients, and the answer could lie in a new therapy involving their own blood stem cells.

More than 2.5 million people suffer from the disabling disease. But a new study shows that patients with aggressive forms of MS may benefit from stem cell transplantation therapy. For this particularly study, Vasilios Kimiskidis and Athanasios Fassas from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Medical School in Greece, and their team of researchers followed 35 people for an average of 11 years after undergoing the transplantation. Before treatment, blood stem cells were removed from a patient's body and stored. The patients were then given high doses of chemotherapy drugs, to destroy the patient's blood and immune cells. The stem cells were then transplanted back into the body.

Before transplantation, all of the study participants were severely disabled and scored an average of six on the EDSS scale which ranks the severity MS disease activity (zero being a normal neurological examination and 10 meaning death). After the transplant, symptoms improved for nearly half of the participants.

"Dr. Kimikidis and Fassas were some of the first people who did this. Even after 15 years, they report that a certain number of patients appear to be in remission from the disease and appear to be stable," Richard Nash, M.D., Professor of Medicine at the University of Washington, and a Member at the Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center in Seattle told American Health.

New Treatment For HIV

(American Health Newswire) - Scientists have proposed a fundamentally new intervention for the HIV/AIDS epidemic based on engineered, virus-like particles that could subdue HIV infection within individual patients and spread to high-risk populations that are difficult for healthcare workers to reach.

Biochemist Leor Weinberger and colleagues at the University of California, San Diego and UCLA used a model that considers the effects of the proposed treatment on several scales, from interference with HIV in infected cells to viral loads in individual patients to the prevalence of HIV in large populations, they determined that the engineered particles could work in concert with current treatments for HIV infection and lower the prevalence of infection more effectively than current drugs or proposed vaccines alone.

"Dr. Weinberger's idea to use engineered virus-derived particles to combat infectious diseases is truly provocative," James Anderson, M.D., Ph.D., Director of the Division of Program Coordination, Planning, and Strategic Initiatives, was quoted as saying.

The engineered particles, called therapeutic interfering particles or TIPs, would persist for years in an individual patient and could be packed with genes that disrupt the functioning of HIV.

TIPs are molecular parasites that 'piggyback' on HIV to spread between individuals," Dr. Weinberger was quoted as saying. The engineered particles use the same outer envelope as HIV but lack the genes for components of this structure and the enzymes needed to assemble it. They can only replicate, infect additional cells and transmit to new individuals by stealing these elements from HIV. Until the host cell is infected with HIV, TIPs remain dormant.

In an HIV-infected individual, TIPs would transmit to others in the same ways as the natural virus - through unprotected sex or shared needles, for example. That means TIPs would, by design, penetrate high-risk populations that are responsible for a disproportionate share of the spread of disease and can be particularly difficult for public-health officials to reach.

Using an epidemiological model, Weinberger and colleagues compared the predicted effects of the treatment they propose with current drug campaigns and hypothetical vaccines and found that TIPs could be more effective.

An intervention using TIPs could lower the number of people infected with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa to one thirtieth the current level in about 30 years, they found. Optimistic predictions for vaccine campaigns or currently available antiretroviral therapy would lower the number of HIV-infected people by less than one half the current level over the same period of time.

TIPs wouldn't replace other therapies, Weinberger said, "In part, we are arguing that TIPs could be used in conjunction with current antiretroviral drug therapy or vaccine campaigns, and could enhance the efficacy of these campaigns at the population level."

SOURCE: PLoS Computational Biology, published online March 17, 2011

Heart Damage Improves With Stem Cell Injection

(American Health Newswire) - It's been shown for the first time that stem cells work according to this human trial.

The researchers believe that the findings are promising for the more than five million Americans who have enlarged hearts due to damage sustained from heart attacks. Patients with enlarged hearts can suffer premature death, have major disability, and experience frequent hospitalizations. Currently, options for treatments are limited to lifelong medications and major medical interventions, such as heart transplantation.

U sing catheters, researchers injected stem cells derived from the patient's own bone marrow into the hearts of eight men (average age 57) with chronically enlarged, low-functioning hearts.

"The injections first improved function in the damaged area of the heart and then led to a reduction in the size of the heart. This was associated with a reduction in scar size. The effects lasted for a year after the injections, which was the full duration of the study," Joshua M. Hare, M.D., the study's senior author and professor of medicine and director of the Interdisciplinary Stem Cell Institute, University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, University of Miami in Miami, Fla., was quoted as saying.

Researchers found that heart size decreased an average of 15 to 20 percent, which about three times what is possible with current treatments. Scar tissue decreased by an average of 18.3 percent, and there was much improvement in the function of specific heart areas that were damaged.

"This therapy improved even old cardiac injuries," Hare said. "Some of the patients had damage to their hearts from heart attacks as long as 11 years before treatment."

The researchers used two different types of bone marrow stem cells- mononuclear or mesenchymal stem cells. The study lacked the power to determine if one type of cell works better than the other. All patients in the study benefited from the therapy and tolerated the injections with no serious adverse events.

Hare said their findings suggest that patients' quality of life could improve as the result of this therapy because the heart is a more normal size and is better functioning. "But, we have yet to prove this clinical benefit - this is an experimental therapy in phase one studies. These findings support further clinical trials and give us hope that we can help people with enlarged hearts."