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Industry: Email Alert RSS FeedHow umbilical cord stem cells are helping life imitate myth
Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, Dec, 2005 by Anthony G. Payne
The transvected hUCSC were administered by an associate of Frank Morales, MD, with Steenblock Research Institute providing technical support and data collection and analysis services to Morales' clinic. It should be noted that Dr. Morales donated his services and time (and that of his staff) to treat Jordan.
In addition, a good-hearted businessman/pilot named Jim Tatum donated the use of his private jet to shuttle Charlotte and Jordan to and from Brownsville, Texas (just across the border from Matamoras, Mexico and the Rio Valley Medical Clinic).
Readers can learn more about MLD by visiting this NIH website: http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/metachromatic_leukodystrophy/metachromatic_leukodystrophy.htm
Like most things in medicine, there is a flip side to hUCSC therapy; which is to say, there are conditions that have responded poorly or not at all. Among these: advanced Multiple Sclerosis, middle-to-advanced stage Lou Gehrig's (ALS), advanced COPD (Emphysema), diabetes type I (No impact on insulin production or use), and Charco Marie Tooth Disease. However, not a single patient followed by SRI has gotten worse as a consequence of the treatment (Some have progressive diseases that by their very nature invite continued deterioration). And in many instances involving progressive diseases, patients had their condition stabilize and even improve for fairly long periods of time.
Although the overall response of patients to treatment with pure umbilical cord stem cells has been salutary, many challenges lie ahead. One of the more daunting ones concerns boosting patient response by getting stem cells to the target tissue or organ. These cells tend to home in on specific cytokine signals expressed by inflamed, infected and damaged tissues and organs. As such, it is important to make sure that these signals are coming from the target tissue or organs and not other sites in the patient's body. Generally, this requires an aggressive screening and pre-stem cell treatment program to quell signals in non-target tissues or organs and concomitantly amplify signals from the target tissues or organ. Also, as heavy metals and other factors can impair or even kill proliferating cells, these too must be eliminated prior to stem cell therapy. In addition, patients who have had injuries years prior have down regulated stem cell attraction molecules in the affected tissues. Thus when stem cells are given, often these people receive little benefit since the stem cells do not know where the damaged tissues are. On-going research is being conducted to determine what methods are best at getting healed up tissues and organs to once again begin churning out stem cell attraction molecules such as stromal derived factor-alpha. This, it is felt, will greatly improve clinical outcome in patients with, for example, heart or brain damage that occurred many years previously. SRI's director, Dr. David A. Steenblock, has made many pioneering inroads in terms of developing and fine-tuning protocols that get quiescent tissue to begin generating cytokine signals that hUCSCs will be attracted to, as well as programs for helping patients maximize stem cell engraftment, proliferation and subsequent activity. These are being offered through the auspices of his clinic in Mission Viejo, California (Brain Therapeutics Medical Clinic, 1-800-300-6063, www.strokedoctor.com)
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