Stem cell therapy infuses new life in them

TNN | Nov 13, 2013, 12.31 AM IST

BANGALORE: Ten years ago, Balakrishan Baldev, a 42-year-old Bangalorean, woke up one
night to a mysterious illness. Working with an oil and gas company, Balakrishan
experienced a stinging pain in his chest and a couple of days later, found himself confined to
a wheel chair.
"I became paralyzed without showing any prior symptoms. One night, I woke up to a
multiple ring of pain in my chest. It felt as if millions of ants were eating me up from inside.
I was taken to various hospitals, but none of the doctors could diagnose the problem,"
recalls Balakrishan.
Balakrishan kept moving from one hospital to another, but to no avail. "I was put on
medication for tuberculosis of the spinal cord in 2005. There were minor improvements,
but I remained on wheel chair till I underwent the stem cell surgery of spinal cord in May
this year," recalls Balakrishan.
It has been six months since the surgery and Balakrishan says his life is getting back to
normal. The 52-year-old is now able to walk using a walker and has started working.
Damaged nerves and spine can lead to critical medical conditions, including paralysis and
render a person immobile. There are few treatments in the world today to repair damaged
nerves and spines. But according to Dr HN Nagaraj, chairman and managing director of
Live 100 hospital, injuries of the spinal cord which are a major cause of paralysis, can be
treated using stem cell therapy. Dr Nagaraj was speaking at the event organized by the
hospital on Tuesday tospread awareness about the therapy.
Khalid Abdullah, a 40-year-old soldier from Yemen, reached to out major hospitals across
the globe before landing in Bangalore. Khalid underwent a surgery of the spinal cord after a
bullet hit him four years ago. "A part of the spinal cord was removed in the surgery as it was
damaged. After that I was paralyzed from waist down. I went to Germany, Italy and China
but found no cure," said Khalid, who underwent stem cell treatment six months ago and has
regained sensation in his lower limbs.
"We started our treatment in regenerative medicine and stem cell therapy three years ago
and have achieved significant success. Patients who entered our hospitals paralyzed below
the neck have walked out using a crutch or walker," said Dr Nagaraj.
While some gain senses in the lower half of their body within three months of treatment, a
few take more time. Against popular conception, the therapy is not very costly. "We have
made regenerative medicine affordable. The treatment is yet to be commercialized," said Dr
Nagaraj.

Stem cell therapy helps girl beat birth defect

TNN | Dec 22, 2013, 12.58 AM IST

HYDERABAD: In a first of its kind case in India, stem cell therapy came to the rescue of a
19-year-old city girl who was suffering from delayed puberty and was unlikely to conceive.
The B Sc (biotechnology) student was suffering from a very rare congenital abnormality.
Her endometrium, the lining on the inside of the uterus that ensures a normal menstrual
cycle, was absent.
Doctors at Beams hospital, Jubilee Hills, generated the uterine lining with the help of stem
cells from the patient's own bone marrow. "The treatment, opted as no other option was left,
successfully set off a normal menstrual cycle," Dr Manjula Anagani, gynaecologist and
laparoscopic surgeon said at a press meet on Saturday.
The patient, after seeking help in various other facilities, had approached the hospital last
December. Even here, regular traditional treatment for getting menstrual cycles failed and
after a thorough diagnosis, the doctors finally detected the abnormality.
"She could never become pregnant which is a major social and psychological issue for the
family and the patient. Now, she is fit and there won't be any issues as she can conceive in
the future," added Dr Manjula. Additionally, she has also been put on hormonal therapy.
According to the hospital doctors, literature search showed that only four such cases of this
abnormality have been recorded globally since 1961. We will send a paper on the case to be
published in an international journal, the doctors said.

In a first, stem cells used to grow fresh lung

tissue
Kounteya Sinha,TNN | Dec 2, 2013, 04.51 PM IST

LONDON: Lung transplants - a huge challenge for medical science for high rates of
rejection, may soon become passe.
Stem cells could soon be used to grow a new lung.
For the first time, scientists have succeeded in transforming human stem cells into
functional lung and airway cells.
The advance, reported by Columbia UniversityMedical Centre (CUMC) researchers, has
significant potential for modelling lung disease, screening drugs, studying human lung
development, and, ultimately, generating lung tissue for transplantation.

"Researchers have had relative success in turning human stem cells into heart cells,
pancreatic beta cells, intestinal cells, liver cells and nerve cells, raising all sorts of
possibilities for regenerative medicine. Now, we are finally able to make lung and airway
cells. This is important because lung transplants have a particularly poor prognosis.
Although any clinical application is still many years away, we can begin thinking about
making autologous lung transplants - that is, transplants that use a patient's own skin cells
to generate functional lung tissue," said study leader Hans-Willem Snoeck, professor of
medicine at CUMC.
"In the longer term, we hope to use this technology to make an autologous lung graft," Dr
Snoeck said.
"This would entail taking a lung from a donor, removing all the lung cells, leaving only the
lung scaffold and seeding the scaffold with new lung cells derived from the patient. In this
way, rejection problems could be avoided," Dr Snoeck is added.
The latest development comes a few years after Dr Snoeck's earlier discovery of a set of
chemical factors that can turn human embryonic stem (ES) cells or human induced
pluripotent stem (iPS) cells into anterior foregut endoderm - precursors of lung and airway
cells.
Columbia University has filed for a patent relating to the generation of lung and airway
epithelium from human pluripotent stem cells and its uses.
There were 5.56 lakh cancer deaths in India in 2010. At 30-69 years, the three most
common fatal cancers in men were: oral (including lip and pharynx, 45,800 (23%), stomach
25,200 (13%) and lung (including trachea and larynx) 22,900 (11%).
There were twice as many deaths from oral cancers as lung cancers, in part due to common
use of chewing tobacco in men and women.
The findings have implications for the study of a number of lung diseases, including
idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF).
"No one knows what causes the disease, and there's no way to treat it," says Dr Snoeck.
"Using this technology, researchers will finally be able to create laboratory models of IPF,
study the disease at the molecular level, and screen drugs for possible treatments or cures".