Stem cell trials may benefit MS patients

Tests taking place at the Frenchay Hospital near Bristol, UK, have raised hopes that stem cell injections could reverse the physical decline experienced by multiple sclerosis (MS) patients.

The trial, led by Neil Scolding, professor of clinical neurosciences for North Bristol NHS Trust, involves injecting patients with stem cells taken from their own bone marrow. The hope is that the stem cells will then travel to the parts of the brain that have been damaged by MS, and repair that damage. 'We believe the bone marrow cells have the capability to repair precisely the type of damage that we see in the brain and spinal chord in MS', said Professor Scolding.

The trial is taking place on six people with MS, aged between 30 and 60. Each person had a pint of bone marrow removed from their pelvises, which was then immediately re-injected into their arms. The patients will now be monitored over several months, to ascertain whether any improvement is experienced, with Mr Scolding predicting that any recovery would be, in the same way as the degeneration, a slow and gradual process.

As the trial is using the patients' own bone marrow, it manages to avoid the controversy surrounding other trials that use stem cells from human embryos. Stem cell therapy has previously been offered in Holland, but it is prohibitively expensive, and uses stem cells taken from babies' umbilical chords, which means that patients run the risk of rejecting the cells.

The trials give hope to the 85,000 people in Britain living with MS, a degenerative disease of the central nervous system, leaving many wheelchair bound and paralysed. Christine Jones, chief executive of the MS Trust, welcomed the trials. She said that 'we are delighted that this new trial is going ahead and there will be an awful lot of people with MS watching it very closely'. However, a spokesman for the MS Society, which funded some of the earlier research into the Bristol trials, warned about raising hopes too high: 'While stem cell research holds exciting possibilities it is still in very early stages', he said. 'There is some way to go before the potential of these cells are fully understood and used to treat MS', he added.