Suffering with an incurable illness is no laughing matter. But last year when we debuted the pilot episode of Stem Cells in Your Face, a lighthearted video series that describes specific diseases and explains the latest progress in stem cell-based therapies, we hoped that a mix of science and humor would help make the information stick in the minds of our viewers. We were thrilled, based on your comments, that you enjoyed watching Treating ALS with a Disease in a Dish as much as we enjoyed producing it and that you wanted to see more:

“Very informative yet easy to understand pilot episode! Hope to see more in this series soon!” “Might I suggest highlighting a different disease CIRM focuses on in each video?”

Ask and you shall receive. This week we’ve posted the second installment: Defeating Sickle Cell Disease with Stem Cells + Jean Gene Therapy which is being rolled out as a companion piece to our new blog feature series, Genes + Cells.

 The video highlights a CIRM-funded clinical trial at UCLA that is testing a stem cell and gene therapy treatment for sickle cell disease. This awful genetic disorder causes red blood cells to assume a sickle shape, clogging blood vessels and producing episodes of excruciating pain, called crises, and leading to progressive organ damage. By twenty years of age about 15 percent of people with sickle cell disease have had major strokes and by 40 almost half of the patients have significant mental dysfunction. The disease strikes one in 500 African Americans and 1 in 36,000 Hispanic people. A standard treatment for sickle cell disease is a blood transfusion but the benefits are short-lived and require repeated procedures. Bone marrow transplants can be curative but they require a well-matched blood donor which is hard to find and can still be very risky. The UCLA team, on the other hand, aims to correct the sickle cell genetic mutation within the blood stem cells of the patient, which in theory could provide a life-long supply of normal shaped red blood cells. Don Kohn, the lead scientist on the team, explains their strategy in the video:

“The approach that we’re looking at would be to take the patient’s own bone marrow, isolate the [blood] stem cells, in the laboratory put in the gene we’ve been working on that prevents the red blood cells from sickling. So transplanting their own bone marrow back to them in theory should be safe, we don’t have to worry about rejection.“

If all goes well, sickle cell disease may soon be a thing of the past. As patient advocate Adrienne Shapiro has so eloquently stated in a previous Stories of Hope blog post:

“It’s my true belief that I’m going to be the last woman in my family to have a child with sickle cell disease. My afflicted daughter is going to be the last child to suffer, and my other daughter [who does not have the disease but carries the sickle cell mutation] is going to be the last one to fear [passing on the disease to her children]. Stem cells are going to fix this for us and many other families.”

This clinical trial represents one of the first trials to be part of CIRM’s Alpha Stem Cell Network. To learn more, visit our Alpha Clinic webpage. And for more details about CIRM-funding of sickle cell disease research visit these pages:

• CIRM’s sickle cell disease fact sheet
• One-Time, Lasting Treatment for Sickle Cell Disease May be on Horizon 
• A personal perspective of sickle cell disease in our Stories of Hope series