Umbilical Cord Blood Stem Cells for Multiple Sclerosis

Not much news over the holiday weekend but there was an interesting report yesterday from the Evening Times in the UK about a lady, Karen Penders who is 34 years old suffering from Multiple Sclerosis for 18 years and could not walk independently for the last 14 years. She had a baby girl* when she was 29 but due to the illness, has been to exhausted to play with her daughter.

As her condition was worsening, she sought treatment at a clinic in Ireland where she had umbilical cord blood stem cells were injected around her eyes, her head and at the base of her spine in the middle of March. The family raised 10,500 GPB (USD 19,407) to pay for the treatment.

The patient reports amazing improvement with fantastic energy and her eyesight immediately improved. It was reported that the stem cells will work for about a year and then she may need a top up of stem cells.

I am wondering how many stem cells they injected and whether they did any processing or culture or HLA matching. It is nice that something positive has come out of the injections, but I wonder if these results can be published in a medical journal and enter for use mainstream medicine.

In Malaysia, the estimates are that approximately 33,000 patients have Multiple Sclerosis and approximately 92,000 in Thailand, 6000 or so in Singapore. If we could use umbilical cord blood stem cells for therapy, this will be a big application for cord blood stem cells banks; and MS patients will have some relief, albeit temporary, from this neurodegenerative disease.

*According to a presentation on www.direct-ms.org, here are some interesting ratios of MS:

MS in the general population in the US is 1:1000
Children developing MS from parents with MS is 1:30 (35X)
Siblings developing MS of patients with MS is 1:25 (40X)
Daughters of mothers with the DR2 gene error is 1:10 (100X)
Identical Twin 1:3 (300X)

Given these statistics, I wonder if Karen Penders had considered banking her baby's stem cells when she was born, and if this technique proves successful, could be used for her own treatment in the future.