New "cure" from uk and Poland. Been posted yet

[PC720]

As a T6 complete injury I would be overjoyed to be able to stand long enough to pull up my own trousers; to make transfers easier; to have better circulation and muscle mass preventing debilitating pressure sores....and don't even get me started on B/B/S!!

I totally agree with this.

[taymas]

GUUUUUYS

BBC ONE, 22:35 (BST) PANORAMA

Apparently they've followed the trial!! Watch it!

[GRAMMY]

wait a minute, wasn't there a person in Poland about 6 months ago to ended upfinding a tumor in her back from of surgery she had 2 years ago transplanting olfactory cells?

My take away from reading the paper is that bulbar, but not mucosal OEC/ONF was used. They utilized a highly purified transplantation of cultured autologous bulbar OEC/ONF's. The patient was offered a new two stage therapeutic approach for obtaining his olfactory bulb for isolation to culture the OEC.

[kate]

What Grammy said. All these things are true at once:

1. Olfactory cell transplants have been tried in animal models for more than 20 years, with results promising enough to justify keeping on keeping on.
2. Certain doctors (Carlos Lima was one) have been doing olfactory cell transplants in humans outside the USA for years; they claim success, but their evidence is always anecdotal and their methods are not published.
3. The patients who've gone to Panama City for these transplants pay $30k for the first round and another $20k for three or four more. There's no promise of return -- not even a promise of no harm.
4. Some of the Lima-method patients have developed nasty mucus in their cords that required surgery to remove. Some have regained either sensation or movement, according to their own reports. There are no published records to show what their condition was pre-intervention. (I know one young man who got his first cells before he was 4 months post, long before the spontaneous recovery period had ended.)
5. This trial is the real deal. Long, long careful effort to do animal models that led to a chance to try with a person, and the cells are the reason for return, because he was years past his injury. The guy had an 8 mm gap in his cord -- that's the height of four US nickels stacked on top of one another. A HUGE distance to cross inside the cord.

It's always "not the cure" . . . but this is, like the epistim work and the neural stem cell work, about a human patient getting return from a chronic and complete injury. We're getting somewhere!

[lollypop]

No ifs or buts this is the real deal panorama special bbc 10.30 21st oct i heard geoff raisman on radio 4 bbc this morning every neurosurgeon needs to be looking at this every sci needs to push this is the dawn move it on asap its not just clinical trial when dna was discovered nobody took much notice dont play it down and by the way he does not want financial gain

this is big

[JamesMcM]

Do Olfactory cells repair neurons, like neural cells. Might be a dumb question. They made no mention of BBS recovery, I would presume there was some, and they just didn't look at those aspects of recovery. Wouldn't consider this a cure, but it's a major start and even though I am a quadriplegic I wouldn't think twice about joining this next trial if possible.

[GRAMMY]

What Grammy said. All these things are true at once:

1. Olfactory cell transplants have been tried in animal models for more than 20 years, with results promising enough to justify keeping on keeping on.
2. Certain doctors (Carlos Lima was one) have been doing olfactory cell transplants in humans outside the USA for years; they claim success, but their evidence is always anecdotal and their methods are not published.
3. The patients who've gone to Panama City for these transplants pay $30k for the first round and another $20k for three or four more. There's no promise of return -- not even a promise of no harm.
4. Some of the Lima-method patients have developed nasty mucus in their cords that required surgery to remove. Some have regained either sensation or movement, according to their own reports. There are no published records to show what their condition was pre-intervention. (I know one young man who got his first cells before he was 4 months post, long before the spontaneous recovery period had ended.)
5. This trial is the real deal. Long, long careful effort to do animal models that led to a chance to try with a person, and the cells are the reason for return, because he was years past his injury. The guy had an 8 mm gap in his cord -- that's the height of four US nickels stacked on top of one another. A HUGE distance to cross inside the cord.

It's always "not the cure" . . . but this is, like the epistim work and the neural stem cell work, about a human patient getting return from a chronic and complete injury. We're getting somewhere!

Hopefully work continues in this nerve grafting strategy so we can have an optimized treatment with the best combination of cells or molecules and enzymes. This latest paper is again focusing attention on the PNG grafting strategy that was shown beneficial by Jerry Silver in the respiratory and bladder papers with rat models not so long ago. It would probably be difficult to mimic the rehab portion in rats to the extent that was done in this human study case. It is exciting to see the regeneration possibilities after a complete spinal cord injury at such a chronic time point in a human too.

[GRAMMY]

Do Olfactory cells repair neurons, like neural cells. Might be a dumb question. They made no mention of BBS recovery, I would presume there was some, and they just didn't look at those aspects of recovery. Wouldn't consider this a cure, but it's a major start and even though I am a quadriplegic I wouldn't think twice about joining this next trial if possible.

Yes, BBS recovery is explained in the paper. It will probably be discussed in the television specials that will be aired...

[CarlBarnardo]

Doc Wise.......your thoughts??

[Adrian]

From interviews I heard on the radio this morning, one of the reasons they chose this particular patient is that the damage to the cord was a remarkably clean cut compared to most spinal injuries. However they also said that whilst more typical injuries may be more complex to treat with this approach that should not preclude this approach from working.

I first heard of Geoff Raisman's work shortly after I was injured in 1997 and I got the impression that he had been researching this for some time before then. The patience and dedication to stick with this and bring it to this stage deserves our respect. Hopefully the attention this is now getting will direct more funding into this field and lead to accelerated progress.

[KyleP2112]

Should we really be excited or is this another "too good to be true" story?

[Ironside]

They said that they still got three to seven years of research which will probably turn into 20 years, just like all the other so-called breakthroughs that we've had in the last 25 years. I don't like to be cynical but I've seen these things happen far too often to let myself get taken in and excited

[Curt Leatherbee]

May have been posted already, but why does this work now? It did not work before, many people had this done including Susan Fajt who is no longer with us. We were all excited about OEG's here over a decade ago and it never panned out. I don't mean to burst anybodies bubble or anything but I think this is false hope. It's all over the news and everybody is excited.

[JamesMcM]

Whether it is or isn't the news it's getting is good. Them saying we're getting hope to get peoples life back, is great publicity. That's what we need, we don't need this optimistic we're okay in chairs bullshit, we need the reality that we need people to know how bad it really is, that includes friends, family, random people, researchers, doctors, psychologists you name ie. from our own mouths it's just whining, from things like this, papers, articles, TV as disturbing as it is it becomes real.

[GRAMMY]

May have been posted already, but why does this work now? It did not work before, many people had this done including Susan Fajt who is no longer with us. We were all excited about OEG's here over a decade ago and it never panned out. I don't mean to burst anybodies bubble or anything but I think this is false hope. It's all over the news and everybody is excited.

I believe that Susan went to Portugal for the transplantation of minced "mucosa" OEC from Lima. Whereas this is a specially derived 2 step process bulbous OEC injected into a nerve graft. One of the patient’s olfactory bulbs was removed and used to derive a culture containing olfactory ensheathing cells (OEC) and olfactory nerve fibroblasts (ONF). Following resection of the glial scar the cultured cells were transplanted into the spinal cord stumps above and below the injury, and the 8 mm gap bridged by 4 strips of autologous sural nerve.