The state's stem-cell institute has awarded $20 million to UC Irvine researchers, along with a private company, to prepare the way for human testing of a treatment for spinal-cord injuries in the neck region -- one that could restore movement and independence for some of the 1.3 million spinal-cord injury sufferers in the United States.
The treatment, developed by the husband and wife research team, Aileen Anderson and Brian Cummings, along with StemCells Inc. of Newark, Ca., would involve injecting versatile human neural stem cells into the neck area.
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The cells, capable of transforming themselves based on cues from the body, could then migrate to the injured area and perhaps repair the protective sheaths, known as myelin, around nerve cells. If the treatment works as expected, it would restore movement and body control for patients with debilitating injuries.
While the treatment has the potential to allow the paralyzed to walk again, more modest gains are more likely -- and well worth the effort, Anderson said Friday.
"Obviously that would be, of course, what we in our wildest dreams would see in a clinical trial," she said. "But likely what you're going to see for any spinal cord injury is much more incremental improvement in function. For people with spinal cord injuries, that could be a huge thing. It could help with health care costs, the ability to function independently. If you can type on a computer, versus not, or write with a pen -- it changes an awful lot."
The $20 million was among $150 million authorized on Thursday by the board of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, a stem-cell funding body created by a California voter initiative in 2004.
Anderson and Cummings are among a cadre of stem-cell scientists at UCI's Sue & Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center, and have already pushed the field forward.
A treatment they developed for chronic spinal cord injury, along with StemCells Inc., is now being tested on patients in Switzerland, and was recently shown to be safe for the first group of patients to receive it.
And StemCells Inc., which grows the human neural stem cells from donated brain tissue of surgically aborted fetuses, helped score another recent success involving UCI researchers including Frank LaFerla of UCI MIND.
In that case, the cells were used to restore memory and brain function in mice bred to model the effects of Alzheimer's disease. That achievement, announced just last week, also eventually could be translated into treatments for humans with the disease.
The $20 million, Anderson said, will allow her and Cummings over the next four years to gather the large amount of data needed before human trials can begin.
That includes determining how long after a spinal cord injury the treatment might be effective, along with collecting data on the safety of the proposed treatment.
The ultimate goal would be the filing of an application to begin human trials of the treatment.
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