Source: Telegraph.co.uk - United Kingdom
Similar cells from the nasal lining have already been injected into three
spinal injury patients in safety tests conducted by Prof Alan MacKay-Sim and his
team at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia.
Prof Geoffrey Raisman said that the Australian work was the closest to his own
and that he had good relations with the team, which works with Prof François
Féron of a CNRS unit in Marseilles.
In Beijing, Dr Hongyun Huang cultivates the nasal nerve cells of aborted
foetuses and injects them into the brains and spines of patients.
But Prof Raisman said that questions remain over Dr Huang's results and his
methods: "He is extending the procedure to beyond what the laboratory evidence
would predict, such as motor neuron disease, and he is not collecting data for
long enough to convince us that the results are convincing."
Another trial with nasal tissue has been conducted by Dr Carlos Lima at the Egaz
Moniz Hospital in Lisbon. But Prof Raisman said that Dr Lima directly implants a
mixture of nasal cells into his patients, (without growing them in the lab, as
is done at UCL), removes scar tissue, which is "extremely controversial," and
the evidence that this method works is anecdotal.
In the USA, mice with spinal cord injuries have been repaired with the help of
human stem cells, grown from an aborted foetus, by a team at the University of
California, Irvine. In their study, which took three years, Dr Brian Cummings,
Dr Aileen Anderson and colleagues injected adult human neural stem cells into
mice with limited mobility.
The mice showed improvements in walking compared with mice that received either
no cells or a control transplant of human fibroblast cells, which cannot turn
into nervous system cells.