A Review of the State of Stem Cell Therapy for Stroke Patients

The author of this open access review asks whether or not we can consider stem cell therapy to aid recovery from stroke to be a solved problem. Given that clinical trials are underway, is it just a matter of time and we can all agree that viable treatments exist? Unfortunately matters might not be that cut and dried, and recent clinical trials have failed for reasons that can be hypothesized to center around differences in the production of cells for transplantation. Nothing is ever straightforward in biology and medicine. Further, in the long term, why would we ever want medical technologies that only work after the damage is done? The more desirable goal in regenerative medicine is to prevent the deterioration that causes stroke and other traumatic damage to the brain, and thus never wind up in the position of needing greatly enhanced regenerative capacities. In the late 1980s, researchers ushered one of the pioneering laboratory investigations in cell therapy for stroke, demonstrating the survival of rat fetal neocortical grafts in ischemic adult rat cortex. Subsequent studies showed that these grafted fetal cells integrated with the ischemic brain received afferent fibers and vascularization from the host intact tissue and responded to contralateral sensory stimulation with increased metabolic activity. Equally promising are the observations that stroke animals transplanted with fetal striatal cells into the ischemic striatum displayed some improvements in a simp...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs