About 15 million people worldwide suffer from stroke every year. Of these, more than 6 million people die, in other cases, should be a long and difficult rehabilitation, as in acute violation of cerebral circulation worsened motor, speech and some other functions.
As for the brain, its recovery occurs due to neuroplasticity: throughout our life, new connections between healthy neurons are created and new information transfer chains are formed.
However, it also happens that the brain is not able to fully repair itself. In this case, stem cells may come to his aid, said scientists from the University of Georgia (USA).
The new method of treatment involves the use of extracellular vesicles, or exosomes - these are tiny bubbles with a diameter of 30-100 nanometers emitted into the extracellular space by cells of various tissues and organs. In this case, we are talking about stem cell exosomes.
Exosomes are able to overcome any obstacles and barriers. Therefore, they can carry and deliver valuable material to damaged tissues — therapeutic drugs that accelerate regeneration, the authors explain.
First, researchers have grown from pluripotent stem cells two types of cell cultures — mesenchymal and neural stem cells. Their exosomes were loaded with medication and injected with injections into "elderly" 18-month-old mice that had suffered a stroke. This treatment is called AB126.
Experiments have shown that in the second case (with neural stem cells), the effect was much better.
After the introduction of AB126, researchers scanned the rodent brain with magnetic resonance imaging to measure the degree of atrophy. The results showed that the treatment reduced the brain damage of animals by 35% compared with the control group, as well as the loss of brain tissue due to the death by 50%.
In addition, a few days after a stroke, the motor functions of the mice improved, a number of tests confirmed. Other tests showed an improvement in cognitive functions, in particular, the formation of episodic memory improved.
Inspired by such results, the researchers intend to begin the first clinical trials of a new treatment method in 2019.
We add that the production of the drug AB126 is engaged in a startup called ArunA Biomedical. Based on the new method, experts intend to further develop methods for the treatment of epilepsy, as well as injuries to the brain and spinal cord.
By the way, the use of vesicles loaded with medicine is a promising area of future medicine. The storage of such drugs does not require special equipment, and even a low-skilled physician will cope with the treatment. Vesicles can deliver an accurately calculated amount of medication, i.e. suitable for personalized treatment.
The scientific article on the results of the study was published in the medical publication Translational Stroke Research.
When stem cells can be controled and used to treat many health problems we should actually see health care costs come down. Unless of course big pharma can artificially control the price of stem cells and then we will see more of the same.
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More and more evidence is being found of the hypothesis that in the adult organism there is a central depot of “spare parts” in the form of universal multipotent stem cells of the bone marrow, which come to help in those critical for the body situations when local tissue resources are not enough. Like the ambulance team, the bone marrow stem cells, also referred to as mesenchymal cells in medicine, are able to cover considerable distances to get into the catastrophe zone, find areas of damage and patch up the defects of various organs and tissues. I really hope that the price, if controlled by big pharma, will be affordable for people of any social status.
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