Articles from or about Bristol always brings with them a sense of nostalgia for me and its been a while since the last opportunity to visit (StemLife keeps me in Asia, mostly).
Anyway, back to the stem cell news. I was very pleased to see that the Bristol cardiac team based at the Bristol Royal Infirmary and at the University will in August start a stem cell program which involves the injection of autologous (patient's own) bone marrow stem cells into the affected heart during routine coronary bypass surgery. The surgeons, led by Dr. Raimondo Ascione, believe that stem cells can assist in the healing process post surgery, reducing scarring and thereby improving the heart's pumping action. Follow-up time of the patients is stated to be six months, which I think is a perfectly reasonable length of time (based on our experience here).
The work is funded by the British Heart Foundation and amounts to GBP 210,000 (approximately 1,455,070 RM).
The article describes why the surgical team acknowledges the usefulness of stem cells:
In a heart attack, blocked blood vessels starve the heart's muscle of oxygen and cells in that part of the heart die, leaving scarring.
The scarred heart is then less able to pump blood around the body and can lead to heart failure.
While the blood supply to the heart can be improved with coronary bypass surgery or angioplasty (mechanical stretching of the heart blood vessels), these techniques do not restore the viability and function of the area already damaged.
And scarring can cause further complications - a fifth of patients develop a dangerous thinning of the walls of the heart within six months of bypass surgery.
The patients who will be selected are those who suffered a heart attack between 10 days to three months ago, and half of them will receive the stem cells, while the other half will receive a dummy injection.
Are there any ethical issues?
Dr. Ascione says that using the patient's own stem cells will not only avoid the risk of rejection and infection, but also get round any ethical issues sometimes associated with embryonic cells or foetal tissue (which is hotly debated). It was also great that Professor Jeremy Pearson, Associate Medical Director of the British Heart Foundation, is also looking forward to stem cells being used routinely in the repair of damaged hearts.
At StemLife, we also offer adult-derived stem cell therapies for patients with ischemic heart disease. Not all patients are eligible for the program however, so please check with us to see if you're a suitable candidate.
Friday, June 22, 2007
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
1667: First Human Blood Transfusion
Once in a while, an interesting scientific snippet crosses my path and I'll share it with you to increase the number of somewhat weird facts that you may already know (and maybe use it to impress others!).
Did you know that June 15th 1667 was the first time ever that a blood transfusion was given to a human being? (Medical and scientific knowledge of blood was rather primitive back then, people even thought you could stay alive by drinking the blood of others..)
According to this article, the patient was a 15 year-old boy who had been bled so much by the doctor (probably during a procedure) that he required a blood transfusion. The doctor* used sheep's blood and amazingly, the boy managed to recover. Other patients weren't as successful though and the practice was banned. Doctors had no idea back then that interspecies transfusion isn't tolerated by the immune system and that humans have different and sometimes incompatible blood types (humans have 4 types, you inherit your blood types from your parents).
The major blood type groupings were elucidated in 1907, only when a critical piece of the jigsaw puzzle was identified by Viennese physician Karl Landsteiner discovered the presence of agglutinins and iso-agglutinins in the blood. He went on the win a Nobel Prize for his work.
*It seems that the doctor who performed this daring procedure is disputed as either Jean-Baptiste Denys, personal physician to France's King Louis XIV, or Englishman Sir William Lower. While Jean Baptiste is accredited for the transfusion in humans, Sir William Lower was the first to demonstrate blood transfusion from one dog to another in 1665.
You can read about other amusing ancient stories on blood here.
How does this all relate to stem cells?
Well, not much correlation really, except that when we process cord blood and adult peripheral blood, reducing the number of red blood cells is part of the procedure. This is to ensure a smaller volume for infusion and also that the unit can be safely given to a patient with matching stem cell type but a different blood group from the donor.
Saturday, June 16, 2007
Surgeons Using Stem Cells for Bone Fractures
I was intrigued when I saw this article, not so much by the actual announcement of the stem cell work performed, but rather exactly where the location of the hospital was and I was surprised that hospitals outside the major cities of England were also conducting stem cell therapeutic trials.
Oswestry, I found out is a small town in the county of Shropshire, off Shrewsbury on route to the Cambrian mountains near Wales. The Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic Hospital in Oswestry does look like an excellent hospital and has a website which is very detailed. It is clear from the description of the hospital's history that pioneering new techniques and investing in research is a priority, so stem cell clinical application is certainly on their checklist.
The consultant surgeons there have been conducting clinical trials using stem cells obtained from patient's own bone marrow (autologous) to heal bone fractures which could not be successfully healed with conventional techniques using metal pins and plates. According to the report, the research trial plans to take in forty patients. Fifteen patients have since undergone the treatment and 8 out of the first 10 patients followed up are successfully healed (able to drive and return to work).
The procedure:
Surgeons harvest the stem cells from the patient's pelvic bone and multiply the stem cells for a period of 3 weeks.
Consultant surgeon Professor James Richardson said: "Things have worked out quite well. A few patients have needed other procedures, refixation for instance, but the important thing is they're healing."
Surgeons collect the stem cells in a sample of bone marrow, usually from the patient's pelvis. They are purified and then multiplied in a sterile laboratory. 3 weeks later, the surgeons have to re-expose the fracture and place the stem cells at the site. After a few months, the bone appears to regain the strength of its original structure. One of the patients, Sarah Humphreys was one of the first patients to be treated with stem cells and is now able to walk unaided.
She said: "I'm absolutely fine, the leg doesn't give me any problems at all apart from a bit of residual pain if I've been for a long walk, or been a bit more active than I would have been, but not to the extremes it was. I'm basically doing everything I was prior to the accident."
The surgeons aim to treat 40 patients in the clinical trial and due to the autologous nature of the cells, there are no chances of rejection. They are unsure as to how the stem cells transplants work (nature does in deed work in mysterious ways) but speculate that the cells may turn into bone and seal the gap, or play a role in the secretion of chemicals that kick-start the healing process.
The article states: These are experimental treatments for now. But surgeons say the results so far are so promising that stem cells are likely to be widely used on the NHS in a matter of years.
Editor's Note:
I am particularly enthused by these results as StemLife has also been obtaining positive results from patients who have had stem cells in combination with their orthopaedic procedure. We have also been working with a niche and focussed orthopaedic hospital- the Kuala Lumpur Sports Medicine Center. If you have a cartilage injury that you'd like to discuss and explore stem cells may help in its healing, please give us a call.
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Expert Hematologists Say Stem Cell Harvesting is SAFE
If you've been following this blog for a while, this probably isn't news to you, but I thought that this article only lends further credence to those patients concerned about whether stem cells are safe to collect.
Baby umbilical cord blood stem cells certainly are safe to collect, and very apparently so are adult stem cells. The article is so clear in its message that I thought it would be good to excerpt it here for you to read just in case they take it off line.
Experts At Hematologists' Congress In Vienna Say The Procedure For Donating Stem Cells Is Safe EHA Congress 2007
14 Jun 2007
Donating stem cells is almost free of risk for donors and is often the only chance of survival for many patients with certain severe blood or bone marrow diseases. This was the conclusion arrived at in an observation study conducted by the Medical University of Hanover and just presented at the Congress of the European Hematology Association in Vienna.
Stem cell donors can save lives. The only way to fully cure most types of blood cancer (leukemia) is through the transplantation of what are called hematopoetic stem cells, i.e. by transferring healthy blood-building cells from an appropriate donor. Physicians cannot call on cell donors in good conscience unless this procedure is free of danger. There have been isolated cases of donors reported in the past who themselves came down with leukemia several years after making their life-saving gift. Researchers undertook a number of different studies to determine if there was any connection here.
The Congress of the European Hematology Association (EHA), the leading association of experts on blood and bone-marrow diseases in Europe, is currently being held in Vienna. One of the speakers, Dr. Michael Stadler, senior physician in the Department of Hematology, Hemostaseology and Oncology at the Medical University of Hanover (D), presented the results of a recent study on this subject: "Since March 1994, we have examined nearly 600 donors of bone marrow or peripheral stem cells and determined that the donation of stem cells is a very safe procedure. We have not detected a single case of leukemia to date among our donors and unpleasant side effects occurred for a total of only one percent of these individuals."
The study involved 596 donors aged one to 71 (60% males, 40% females). Both common methods of hematopoetic stem cell transplantation were represented, namely classic bone-marrow transplantation and the modern method of peripheral blood stem cell transplantation.
"Bone marrow can only be extracted under general anesthesia and requires a one to two-day hospital stay," explained Dr. Stadler. "During this procedure, a half to one liter of a mixture of blood and bone marrow is suctioned from around the donor's iliac crest, not from the spinal cord, as is often falsely reported. This mixture is filtered and then transfused into the recipient by way of intravenous infusion. The intervention itself takes about one hour. The bone-marrow cells that are removed are replenished in the donor within about two weeks by subsequent cell growth."
Peripheral blood stem cell transplantation is an even simpler and more comfortable procedure for donors. The reason for the designation is that the stem cells are taken not from bone marrow but from the blood stream at the periphery of the body, e.g. from a vein in the arm. This procedure does require biochemical preparation, however. Dr. Stadler: "For a period of five days beforehand, the donor receives a substance called G-CSF, which stands for Granulocyte-Colony Stimulating Factor. G-CSF is a hormone the body produces itself and is released in the case of inflammations to stimulate the reproduction of white blood corpuscles. If administered as a drug in high doses, it accelerates the overall formation of blood and causes blood stem cells that are not yet fully matured to be detached from their environment in bone marrow, for lack of space you might say. These stem cells make their way to the peripheral blood stream where they can be fished out for the patient using a special separation method called stem cell aphaeresis."
G-CSF stimulation in particular was long suspected of being a possible trigger for leukemia in donors over the long term. In their long-time study, however, Dr. Stadler and his colleagues did not observe a single case of leukemia or a single case of death over a period of more than 12 years.
The risk of anything happening to you in harvesting your own stem cells is really minimal, so please don't be afraid to donate or bank your stem cells for yourself and your family members.
Baby umbilical cord blood stem cells certainly are safe to collect, and very apparently so are adult stem cells. The article is so clear in its message that I thought it would be good to excerpt it here for you to read just in case they take it off line.
Experts At Hematologists' Congress In Vienna Say The Procedure For Donating Stem Cells Is Safe EHA Congress 2007
14 Jun 2007
Donating stem cells is almost free of risk for donors and is often the only chance of survival for many patients with certain severe blood or bone marrow diseases. This was the conclusion arrived at in an observation study conducted by the Medical University of Hanover and just presented at the Congress of the European Hematology Association in Vienna.
Stem cell donors can save lives. The only way to fully cure most types of blood cancer (leukemia) is through the transplantation of what are called hematopoetic stem cells, i.e. by transferring healthy blood-building cells from an appropriate donor. Physicians cannot call on cell donors in good conscience unless this procedure is free of danger. There have been isolated cases of donors reported in the past who themselves came down with leukemia several years after making their life-saving gift. Researchers undertook a number of different studies to determine if there was any connection here.
The Congress of the European Hematology Association (EHA), the leading association of experts on blood and bone-marrow diseases in Europe, is currently being held in Vienna. One of the speakers, Dr. Michael Stadler, senior physician in the Department of Hematology, Hemostaseology and Oncology at the Medical University of Hanover (D), presented the results of a recent study on this subject: "Since March 1994, we have examined nearly 600 donors of bone marrow or peripheral stem cells and determined that the donation of stem cells is a very safe procedure. We have not detected a single case of leukemia to date among our donors and unpleasant side effects occurred for a total of only one percent of these individuals."
The study involved 596 donors aged one to 71 (60% males, 40% females). Both common methods of hematopoetic stem cell transplantation were represented, namely classic bone-marrow transplantation and the modern method of peripheral blood stem cell transplantation.
"Bone marrow can only be extracted under general anesthesia and requires a one to two-day hospital stay," explained Dr. Stadler. "During this procedure, a half to one liter of a mixture of blood and bone marrow is suctioned from around the donor's iliac crest, not from the spinal cord, as is often falsely reported. This mixture is filtered and then transfused into the recipient by way of intravenous infusion. The intervention itself takes about one hour. The bone-marrow cells that are removed are replenished in the donor within about two weeks by subsequent cell growth."
Peripheral blood stem cell transplantation is an even simpler and more comfortable procedure for donors. The reason for the designation is that the stem cells are taken not from bone marrow but from the blood stream at the periphery of the body, e.g. from a vein in the arm. This procedure does require biochemical preparation, however. Dr. Stadler: "For a period of five days beforehand, the donor receives a substance called G-CSF, which stands for Granulocyte-Colony Stimulating Factor. G-CSF is a hormone the body produces itself and is released in the case of inflammations to stimulate the reproduction of white blood corpuscles. If administered as a drug in high doses, it accelerates the overall formation of blood and causes blood stem cells that are not yet fully matured to be detached from their environment in bone marrow, for lack of space you might say. These stem cells make their way to the peripheral blood stream where they can be fished out for the patient using a special separation method called stem cell aphaeresis."
G-CSF stimulation in particular was long suspected of being a possible trigger for leukemia in donors over the long term. In their long-time study, however, Dr. Stadler and his colleagues did not observe a single case of leukemia or a single case of death over a period of more than 12 years.
The risk of anything happening to you in harvesting your own stem cells is really minimal, so please don't be afraid to donate or bank your stem cells for yourself and your family members.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
