Stem Cell and Crohn's

[Mark33180]

I was doing some looking around on the web and found this... I was a little confused but it sounds like they "Give" you lukemia to help cure you..... Anyone able to help clarify this?

Stem Cell Research- Crohn’s Disease Patients Cured with Adult Stem Cells
Posted 20 February, 2009 in Crohn's Disease |
In yet another advance in Adult Stem Cell research, doctors in Barcelona, Spain are now curing Crohn’s Disease patients with stem cell therapy using the patient’s own stem cells.

Crohn’s Disease affects approximately 600,000 Americans and millions more worldwide. It is an irritable bowel disease in which the patients suffer from cramps, diarrhea, and continuous abdominal pain. In many cases, Crohn’s Disease sufferers have a diminished quality of life due to the crippling symptoms. For Crohn’s Disease patients, there are almost no treatment options, most are not effective.

At the Hospital Clinic, in Barcelona, Dr. Julián Panés and Dr. Elena Ricart are now treating Crohn’s patients with Adult Stem Cells taken from the patient’s bone marrow. They are reporting that they have treated 6 patients- 3 successfully and 3 others are still being treated. From the press release:

Hospital Clínic de Barcelona is one of the few hospitals in the world to instate cellular therapy using autologous stem-cell transplantation. In the US, the stem cell treatment has been tested on 12 patients with severe Crohn’s disease, of whom 11 have had very good results; in Italy, the treatment has been applied to 4 patients, 3 of whom are also showing excellent progress following the transplant. As Hospital Clínic, 6 patients with Crohn’s disease are already included in the process and, following the international examples, increasing numbers of patients are expected to choose this option to treat the disease in a state that was, to date, practically untreatable.
To summarize that:

11 of 12 Crohn’s Disease patients in the USA who underwent the stem cell therapy had very good results. That is almost 92%!!!
3 of 4 patients in Italy who received this stem cell treatment had excellent results. That is 75%.
If we put them both together, 14 of 16 had great results from the Adult Stem Cells– that is 87.5%Can we call the stem cells a cure yet???
6 Steps:

Here are the 6 steps in the Crohn’s Disease Stem Cell Treatment process at Hospital Clinic in Barcelona. I imagine it is similar to stem cell transplants elsewhere for Crohn’s. :

Initial Chemotherapy (Cyclophosphamide + G-CSF). In this initial phase, leukopenia or reduction of the number of leukocytes (immune-system cells) in the blood is induced in the patient.
Migration of Stem-Cells to the Blood. Following the previous immunosuppression, the organism reacts by releasing stem cells from the bone marrow into the blood; these are the cells which will later be used for the transplant.
Collection of Stem Cells by means of Apheresis. Apheresis is a technique that separates components of the blood. Here, the stem cells that previously migrated from the bone marrow are separated.
Cryopreservation of Stem Cells. When the stem cells have been collected by apheresis, they are frozen and preserved until ready for transplant.
Second Chemotherapy. In this phase, total leukopenia is induced; that is, the immune system is left devoid of leukocytes, ready to be reset with the stem-cell transplant.
Autologous Stem-Cell Transplant. The patient receives the transplant by means of transfusion with his or her own stem cells. The immune system is reset, leading to remission or reduction of the abnormal inflammatory process of Crohn’s disease.

 

[jed]

cant clarify it for you mark, but i'd fly to any where in the world to receive this treatment. go stem cells!!!!!

 

[Mark33180]

OH well i must have misread it... hahaha yeah that makes more sense

 

[jed]

i've just found a contact site for those barcelona doctors, and sent an open invite to join the forums to hopefully shed some more light on what they're doing

 

[Colt]

Could I get some links please? I'd like to get more details on this. It doesn't make any sense scientifically from what you just posted.

I fail to see how this would get rid of the problem. If it was basically an immune transplant it would make sense (though the practicality of this is something well beyond modern medical science), but using your own DNA would just result in going through an onset all over again. It doesn't get rid of the cause of the crohn's disease because it doesn't create anything new.

If there was a cancer or some other mutation involved you could start over with non-mutated cells and hope they don't develop the mutation again, but you'd be risking accidentally harvesting mutated cells to begin with if they were there to the degree that they were causing something like crohn's disease. That, and current methods for creating adult stem cells without a doubt create mutations within a very short period of time. In fact it would be completely unethical to try to use adult stem cells in treatment currently, knowing that no test subject has made it more than a year without developing cancer.

Regardless, there's no indication whatsoever that Crohn's disease is a result of a mutation of any kind, and furthermore even if it was the problem would be in the crohnie's bone marrow which would be the mutated part producing bad immune cells.

The white cells (stem cells don't just magically change into whatever you want them to. You have to change them in a controlled environment first and then implant them as non-stem cells) would die out in a very short period of time and you'd need to be constantly infused with more and more white cells produced outside of your body. Each person receiving treatment would need a huge laboratory just dedicated to supplying their immune system. Even then, you'd have to wipe out all of the bone marrow in the patient's body to keep the bad cells from being produced, which again is incredibly impractical and would also require a constant infusion of red cells.

It's no different than curing Crohn's by infecting people with HIV and letting it develop into full blown AIDS. The improvements they are bragging about are almost certainly nothing but a result of destroying their immune system. Just the same as giving someone methotrexate or imuran to reduce their white cell count, but to a crazy extreme.

Not only is their logic flawed but they're committing the scientist's version of suicide by releasing uncontrolled studies with no observation time whatsoever. They're going to be laughed right out of every peer reviewed journal they submit this to. Medical studies have to go years or even decades with huge sample groups before their results can be judged. You don't make big announcements of a cure using a 12 person (or 4!!) person sample with an observation period shorter than the average remission period.

Imagine if I picked out 4 of you guys, got you completely stoned out of your mind, waited 30 minutes, asked you if you felt better, and then when 3 of you said yes announced that I had cured crohn's disease.

It just goes on and on with all of the problems with this idea. I don't have the time, or mental energy to go over all of them. It's really kind of upsetting that anyone with enough credibility to get a grant for that kind of research would make such huge mistakes.

Stem cells are good for one thing: Artificially grown organs and tissues. It's a source of material to transplant with. Stem cells are not magical. They simply, potentially, provide the ability to create perfectly healthy, fresh, DNA-Matched (no rejection or anti-rejection drugs) transplant organs and tissues that no one has to die for. Granted that is a HUGE deal and could potentially cure a lot of problems, but it's not some simple miracle cure for everything where you just inject someone and any problems they have instantly go away. If you inject someone with stem cells they're just float around and eventually die. They don't do anything on their own.

Imagine having any damage or defect in your body able to be replaced like installing a new transmission in your car. For us crohnies stem cell research mostly means intestinal transplants. No more fear of short bowel syndrome. Got a stricture in your ileum? We're not just going to resect you anymore, now we're going to grow you a new ileum in a lab, cut out the old one, and replace it with the new one and you'll be good as new until the crohn's disease ruins that ileum, then we can just give you another one, and so on.

 

[kello82]

colt makes a good point i think, and i think that that could happen too. whats to stop the new immune system from turning bad like our first one?

but ive also heard that some think that an individual has a genetic predisposition to Crohns and a trigger must be introduced for the disease to occur. this makes me think that there are people walkin around with the makings for crohns in their dna, but have not and may never be triggered to develop the problem.

who knows, if this is true than maybe these stem cell people with new immune systems will not be triggered and thus will be those happy people walkin around with weird dna.

or maybe they will.

no one knows!

 

[jed]

thats why i'd love to see one of these medical people here to talk about it

 

[Colt]

As far as onset and genetic diseases, known genetic diseases vary in onset the same as crohn's does. Huntington's is a great example.

Growing organs like plants is precisely the potential people are talking about when they dumb it down talking about cures. It's not going to cure crohns or any other systemic problem. But, it can provide treatments that remove the serious complications like short bowel. The reason bowel transplants don't work is rejection. The bowel will not be rejected if it shares the same DNA. Of course it's a very long way down the line. All stem cell technology is (another thing most people do not understand).

Regardless, you can't just activate stem cells to go and fix things like little nanobots. Stem cells are just cells that can be turned into other cells with tampering. Adults do not have significant stem cells. 'Adult' stem cells are created in a lab by infecting them with a virus. The virus damages the DNA in the proccess and causes cancer. There's some work on trying to find a way that does not use a virus, but anyone claiming to use adult stem cells now is doing so knowing that the cells will turn cancerous after a few replications. Adult cells just replicate, they don't turn into another organ.

If you take a clump of stem cells and introduce the proper catalyst to turn them into heart muscle tissue you just have a clump of heart muscle tissue. It won't go and do anything. What you can do is to implant that tissue to replace missing or damaged tissue. That clump is not going to move around scrubbing the clots out of your arteries or anything else.

Sadly the whole issue has been terribly exhadurated and simplified to get it through the whole public opinion madness. Everyone has completely lost track of the reality. Yes stem cells could eventually cure a broken spine, but not by eating them or injecting them or whatever. It's simply the potential of creating tissue with your DNA with which you can replace the nerves and such without it being rejected that could cure spinal injuries. It's that eventual use of either adult stem cells or DNA transplanted embryonic cells to easily create any tissue in the body with no fear of rejection that makes stem cell research so important because transplant/implant rejection is seriously hampering what medical science can do.

 

[D Bergy]

There is a promising field in which it may be possible to regenerating limbs by stimulating the area of the lost limb with minute currents that exist in simpler life forms and even to a lesser degree in humans.

There is not much study in this area that I know of right now, but the mechanism is understood by a few researchers. I am not sure if this could be applied to regenerating internal organs due to the difficulty in localizing internal microcurrents.

In children this regeneration works to a small extent. If a child loses a fingertip below the last crease in the knuckle nearest the end of the finger and it is not sewn shut, the fingertip will regenerate. In adults it will not. There are small currents that convert regular cells into cells needed to rebuild a fingertip. That is oversimplified but is the process in general.

Just another future area with potential.

Dan

 

[saidinstouch]

I don't see this becoming a standard care anytime soon as I believe stem cell replacement therapy (which is what you described basically) is highly dangerous and the survival rate of the procedure can be fairly low, or least was in the past. Unless your crohns is that bad, you probably are better off looking elsewhere until this technique is a bit safer and more studied.

 

[Colt]

Again, stem cells can't magically repair something. Even if you developed a method of triggering a change in stem cells inside the body it would just cause tumors of the target tissue type. It won't remove or repair damage, only add tissue.

 

[D Bergy]

They have regrown extra legs on reptiles in places they do not normally grow using electrical microcurrents. They were not lumps of cancerous tissue but exact replicas of the other legs.

It is already being done on a simple level.

Dan

 

[Colt]

I understand that Bergy, but the development is very different in humans. That's why we don't regenerate much to begin with. The methodology behind fetal transformation in humans creates a lot of situations where you can't do something because it would require the rest of the body to be at an early stage of development. It's like turning the tail blue on a frog. You could do that back when it was a tadpole but now there's no real tail to change the color of.

 

[saidinstouch]

From a biological standpoint, making stem cells do what we want is fairly complex involving a number of factors that are not well understood. Right now they are sort of voodoo magic that work through somewhat unknown means. My best guess would be that their presence essentially gives the body a set of stem cells that function properly and can be regulated within the body by our innate regulatory systems. However development and patterning issues are far more complex and involve a number of nuclear hormone receptors (i.e. glucocorticoid(prednisone target), androgen, estrogen, mineral, and retinoid(vitamin A)) and the genes they regulate at various times. This science is not well understood and is an area of active research and will be important to making stem cells more than voodoo magic that work. If we want selective control it will take a lot more time, but as it stands we can definitely control certain aspects of their growth and differentiation, its just a matter of how applicable to being therapeutics in the sense of organ replacement they will be in the near future.

 

[D Bergy]

It probably will not help most of us, but possibly future generations.

Dan

 

[jed]

i did a copy and paste of the opening post and sent it to my doc with some other questions we're talking about, and this was his response

Just on the stem cell research. The chemotherapy needed prior to the stem cell transplant unfortunately carries a signifiacnt mortality. This used to be around 20% although it may have improved with better support for the life threatening infections people develop while their bone marrow regenerates. Not a treatment for the faint hearted!!

so, if they attached the word "cure" to this kind of treatment (and i mean cure in the future when they know 100% it works), how many people would risk the 20% mortality (if that hasn't changed?)

i would be highly interested.

 

[danman]

It would certainly be worth considering Jed.

But as I can't see it being offered, I can't say if I would take it up.

Barcelona's a beautiful city though, I got engaged there. I'd love any excuse to go back.

 

[AbstractDonut]

My thinking is that they want to reset the immune system. The cells at the infection site are damaged, new immune cells will take a while to revert to the damaged stage.

Since everyone here has had a time when they did not have the disease you must imagine that our cells have the capacity to be normal. It could just be the cells at the inflammation site need to be reset.

The treatments could be similar to the treatments used now, instead of a slow killing of the immune system they knock it out once a year.

 

[D Bergy]

I think your idea is a sound one. The ability to do that is probably extremely difficult.

I have tried some alternative Immune system resetting methods. None of them have done a thing. If it really could be done or can be in the future, it would be a huge leap forward for many diseases.

Dan

 

[BWS1982]

Firstly, they threw in the word "cure" which is already suspect considering the post and the measly sample of less than 2 dozen patients, and secondly, they called Crohns an "irritable bowel disease," which just slaughtered their veracity if you ask me. I think 'George' has a better shot at helping me than the author of the text Mark originally posted (I know Mark didn't write it).

Sorry, but I'm not holding my breath (but as current medical science would have it, I am still holding my sphincter.....) :tongue:

 

[scared_mom]

This is interesting! As I was reading through this a thought just popped into my head...I'm wondering if it would be worth it to bank my new baby's cord blood. If they could possibly use it if the baby were to end up with it too...or even use it for Grier... No idea if cord blood can be used that way, anyone know?

 

[danman]

Not sure mom.
Is it not the placenta that can be used for stem cells?

I would seriously consider this for the future if we get pregnant again.