Stem cell research could provide stroke breakthrough

October 28, 2009

By Judy Monchuk    
Writer
Troy Media 

CALGARY, AB, Oct. 8, 2009/ Troy Media/ – A new hormone treatment stimulating stem cell growth in immediate stroke victims could provide a breakthrough in repairing brain damage caused by stroke and offer hope to millions suffering its debilitating aftereffects.

Clinical trials are underway for the groundbreaking process, which uses drug therapy to activate adult stem cell production and replace the brain matter destroyed by stroke.

Alan Moore

“You’ve got a hole in your brain after a stroke and we’re basically filling it,” says Alan Moore, CEO and president of Stem Cell Therapeutics, a biotechnology company that has spent the past five years developing ways to fire up a patient’s stem cells and other treatments to repair brain function lost to disease or traumatic injury.

Third-leading cause of death in North America 

Thursday is World Stroke Day, a time to focus attention on the 5.7 million stroke deaths each year. Stroke is the third-leading cause of death in North America, killing nearly 145,000 Americans and 14,000 Canadians annually. Yet its greater cost is in the vast numbers of people left disabled after blood flow to the brain is disrupted, causing damage or destruction of brain cells.

Figures from the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada, a charity dedicated to eliminating heart disease and stroke, note that only 10 per cent of people who suffer a stroke fully recover. The Canadian Stroke Network, a nonprofit corporation working to reduce the physical, social and economic effects of stroke on patients and society, estimates that less than half of those who survive a stroke ever return to work — putting additional financial and emotional pressure on the patient’s family. 

In Canada alone, strokes are calculated to cost the economy billions of dollars each year in doctor visits, hospital costs and lost productivity.

Just as quick intervention is critical in limiting stroke damage, timing is crucial in testing recovery prospects. In Stem Cell Therapeutics clinical trials, patients must start treatment within 48 hours of suffering a moderate stroke. Researchers hope to gather 120 subjects by the end of 2009 from locations across Canada, the United States and India.

Breakthrough stroke therapy 

Stem Cell Therapeutics researchers’ strongly believe they have developed a regenerative process that could be a major step forward in stroke therapy. The 90-day program uses two successive protein-based hormones: The first causes stem cells to multiply, while the second permits the new cells to survive and directs them to become the grey matter lost in a stroke. 

The research is built on work done by Sam Weiss, director of the Hotchkiss Brain Institute at the University of Calgary, who discovered that the adult brain produces stem cells to fix itself. Since then, scientists have been searching for ways to stimulate the cells and heal brain damage that follows strokes and traumatic brain injury.

Preliminary research in brain-injured rats that received the treatment found a dramatic improvement in brain activity after 90 days, compared with rats that had not received the drugs. MRI images of a man who has undergone the treatment show similar distinct changes before and after therapy. The latter images show the cavity of destroyed brain cells has largely been filled.

Neurologist Michael Hill, principal researcher for the clinical trials and director of the stroke unit at Calgary’s Foothills Hospital, cautions that simply replacing the brain cells may not mean replacing the same brain functions. More research must be done to determine if the new cells must relearn all the information that previously took a lifetime to compile.

“I think it has promise, but I don’t know to what magnitude,” says Hill. He likens the regeneration process to the flip side of the popular anti-drug campaign showing a sizzling egg in a frying pan and the slogan, “This is your brain on drugs.”

“You’re born with a scrambled brain and you have to learn to put that brain in order,” says Hill. “That’s what life lessons are for. This is about regenerating your brain and you can’t regenerate with the same connections it had before.”

Yet if the process is successful, it could provide treatment potential for other conditions. Stem Cell Therapeutics has two other clinical trials set to begin later this year for medication aimed at reversing and/or modifying the damage caused by traumatic brain injury and multiple sclerosis. Results are expected in mid- 2010.

Sidebar – Stem cell research controversy disarmed by scientific advances

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Channels: Calgary Beacon, February 2, 2010