alt.hn

3/24/2025 at 6:07:04 PM

First-of-its-kind trial enables paralysed man to stand via stem cell injection

 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00863-0?linkId=13622861

by bentobean

3/27/2025 at 4:24:59 PM

Possibly enables him to stand, according to the article - several other patients weren't helped by the treatment, and in the case that showed a positive effect the researchers currently can't eliminate the possibility of natural recovery causing the improvement.

But it's promising work, shows the treatment seems at least to be safe, and more research will no doubt follow to clarify this.

by lambdaone

3/27/2025 at 5:37:18 PM

It wasn’t clear from the article: how do you naturally recover from a spinal cord injury? I’m assuming we can’t be talking about a fully severed spinal cord.

Is it common to recover from a spinal cord injury that leads to some sort of paralysis?

by adamtaylor_13

3/27/2025 at 6:10:41 PM

Common? No idea.

I witnessed someone paralyzed from cervical radiculopathy in the neck caused by youthful horseplay. Full recovery within a month. Scared us all when he went limp.

by bobmcnamara

3/27/2025 at 8:04:43 PM

Nerves do regrow, just very very slowly.

by chrisweekly

3/27/2025 at 9:58:33 PM

Nerves do regrow, but not from the spinal cord as I understand it, and just because they regrow does not mean they regrow along the path which is needed to repair function.

My father broke his Bricial Plexis (the nerves running through your shoulder to your arm). There was an 18 hour surgery to re-trace the path for the nerves to grow. Some nerves made a connection, and he has minimal movement in his fingers. However, most of his arm is still paralyzed.

by pedalpete

3/27/2025 at 10:03:59 PM

I got the ear nerve almost severed as a kid and I am still 100% deaf from that ear, it's been 30 years already.

by ainiriand

3/27/2025 at 11:26:14 PM

What, shouldn't that nerve be more ...internal...what crazy head injury did you sustain

by delfinom

3/28/2025 at 1:24:51 PM

The man in question can and did stand, no 'possibly' about it.

This statement a specific case is different than the probability of it working in general.

by mb7733

3/28/2025 at 3:59:43 PM

> The man in question can and did stand, no 'possibly' about it.

Nobody said otherwise. It's still very true that this treatment only possibly enabled him to stand.

From the article:

>Larger trials will be needed to establish whether the improvements observed in the two individuals in the current study were a result of the treatment.

by RIMR

3/31/2025 at 9:01:53 PM

Sorry, misread your post.

by mb7733

3/27/2025 at 11:29:18 PM

Easy way to eliminate the possibly.

Stop the immunosuppressant pills and see what happens.

by delfinom

3/27/2025 at 4:44:31 PM

How does a stem cell with somebody else's DNA not trigger your own immune system? I'd understand if you could repurpose your own bone marrow (which is a type of stem cell, right?) or neurological stem cells, but I'd sort of expect the immune system to reject others similar to a bad organ transplant or wrong blood type transfusion.

by kylehotchkiss

3/27/2025 at 4:47:51 PM

From the article:

> Recipients were given immune-suppressing drugs to prevent their bodies from attacking the cells for six months after the surgery.

by y-c-o-m-b

3/27/2025 at 4:55:25 PM

Seems like it would need to be lifelong because those cells end up differentiating and fixing the damage so they will always be in there.

by dyauspitr

3/27/2025 at 5:39:38 PM

Immunosuppressive or immune modulating drugs are not that bad. Usually people can take them without too much issues. Yes: Your risk for cancer increases a bit and you have to be careful to not get sick etc. but overall its not that bad.

Most people who have autoimmune diseases also need to take those drugs usually for life – (smaller dosages but still)...

by umpalumpaaa

3/28/2025 at 7:33:05 AM

Not all are "not that bad". Dimethyl-fumarate which I take for MS is not as bad (nor strong), but there are ones with a very serious side-effect profile. I am happy I could stick to dimethyl-fumarate. I still have to have blood tests done every 3 months to see if my liver is OK, but then again, I take Silymarin and NAC, so should be OK.

For the curious, NAC is given for people with acetaminophen toxicity which destroys your liver.

Silymarin is from Milk Thistle.[1]

[1] https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/422884, https://web.archive.org/web/20250101032455/https://www.medsc...

by johnisgood

3/27/2025 at 5:54:19 PM

> and you have to be careful to not get sick etc.

Sooo easy.

by LoganDark

3/27/2025 at 6:02:57 PM

Especially if you have kids.

by throwway120385

3/27/2025 at 8:06:15 PM

or work in an office, one kid gets sick, guess what, now it's your problem

by JohnMakin

3/27/2025 at 10:04:45 PM

I have sympathy for people with autoimmune diseases on immunosuppressants who have family in developing countries, where a lot of complicated infections are easier to catch. They solve the problem in the context of our (generally? decreasingly?) sterile world, but not globally.

by kylehotchkiss

3/28/2025 at 7:41:44 AM

I take dimethyl-fumarate, and I have been at the hospital for a week getting very high doses of corticosteroid infusions, and thankfully I did not catch anything. I have not had common cold for almost a decade, yet I have been on steroids (both via IV and pills) and I have been on an immunomodulator (not suppressant, however) for almost a decade.

I have not even caught COVID yet been exposed to it (has been quarantined three times with someone with COVID).

These medications for MS are very expensive, but since in Hungary there are subsidies for it, it costs as much as 1 USD instead of 1500 USD per month.

by johnisgood

3/28/2025 at 4:42:06 AM

Biologics are phenomenal for this. Especially the selective ones.

Sadly, they are also inaccessible to people of lower socioeconomic status.

by jjmarr

3/27/2025 at 6:32:27 PM

It would seem worthwhile to bank things like umbilical cord blood so that if these therapies work in the future, you have a supply of your own cells. Immunosuppressive therapy isn’t that fun.

by trollbridge

3/27/2025 at 7:56:28 PM

That would be cool, being able to generate stem cells with your own DNA dynamically later in life would be cooler (please pardon my elementary biology approach to this, I know that is an an Everest sized mountain to climb)

by kylehotchkiss

3/27/2025 at 9:14:09 PM

There are companies now offering stem cell culturing and storage from adult samples. Something I've been meaning to look into actually.

by tempestn

3/24/2025 at 6:36:20 PM

That’s truly amazing! Maybe someday we can heal brain damage his way.

by sharpshadow

3/27/2025 at 7:24:47 PM

Could a bio compatible gel containing steroids not work instead of systemically giving steroids?

by CommanderData

3/27/2025 at 5:31:24 PM

Isn't Ronnie Coleman also going through this to be able to walk again?

by busymom0

3/28/2025 at 8:49:00 AM

sorry, slightly offtopic: does anyone have any experience or can recommend good clinics (in europe) for doing stem-cell therapy for lower back pain (damaged discs)?

by dinkblam

3/28/2025 at 5:41:37 PM

There was some guy on reddit 10 years ago who got stem cell injections in China and was able to walk after being paralyzed and posted about it. Almost everyone on the thread gaslighted him that he must have never actually been paralyzed or was lying. The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.

by narrator

3/27/2025 at 4:47:50 PM

[dead]

by dadjoker