Stroke

Fighting for his life and the lives of other stroke survivors

/ Kevin McCormack / 1 Comment
Sean Entin, stroke survivor and founder of Stroke Hacker

The word “miraculous” gets tossed around a lot in the world of medicine, mostly by people who have made an unexpected recovery from a deadly or life-threatening condition. In Sean Entin’s case calling his recovery from an almost-fatal stroke could be called miraculous, but I think you would also have to say it’s due to hard work, determination, and an attitude that never even considered giving up.

Sean had a stroke in 2011. Doctors didn’t think he’d survive. He was put into a coma and underwent surgery to create an opening in his skull to give his brain time and space to heal. When he woke he couldn’t walk or talk, couldn’t count. Doctors told him he would never walk again.

They didn’t know Sean. Fast forward to today. Sean is active, has completed two 5k races – that’s two more than me – and has created Stroke Hacker, a program designed to help others going through what he did.

Sean is a remarkable man, which is why I sat down to chat with him for the latest episode of the California Institutes for Regenerative Medicine’s podcast, ‘Talking ‘Bout (re)Generation’.

He is a fascinating man, and he makes for fascinating company. Enjoy the podcast.

The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) has invested more than $80 million in stroke research, including one clinical trial currently underway.

Reprogramming brain cells to restore vision after a stroke

/ Katie Sharify / Leave a comment

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About one third of stroke survivors experience vision loss. It can be a devastating side effect as most patients will not fully recover their vision and there are currently no reliable treatments available. But thanks to a collaborative effort by two teams of researchers from Purdue University and Jinan University in China, there may be a way to use gene therapy to recover lost vision after a stroke.

A stroke happens when part of the brain is starved of oxygen which can result in death of brain cells or neurons. Oftentimes this is caused by a blockage in an artery in the brain. Given the location of these vital arteries, most strokes lead to loss of motor function and in some cases, permanent vision loss.

The brain is an incredible machine and capable of remapping its neural pathways enough to restore some visual function, but this isn’t always the case. The neurons that are destroyed in the process of experiencing a stroke do not regenerate and lose their ability to communicate/transmit information between different areas of the brain, and between the brain and the rest of the nervous system.

Two research teams, one led by Alexander Chubykin at Purdue University’s and the other led by Gong Chen at Jinan University, have taken a different approach to neural regeneration by reprogramming local glial cells into neurons, therefore restoring connections between the old neurons and the newly reprogrammed neurons.

In a news release, Dr. Chubykin says the results in the lab look promising. “We can watch the mice get their vision back. We don’t have to implant new cells, so there’s no immunogenic rejection. This process is easier to do than stem cell therapy, and there’s less damage.”

The collaborative research, published in the journal Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology, is promising not only in aiding with vision restoration after a stroke but could also lead to similar treatment for reestablishing motor function. Visual function is easier than motor skills to measure accurately and the scientists are looking into the effectiveness of this procedure in live mice using advanced optical imaging tools. If the study continues to provide positive results, it might not be long before human trials are started. 

CIRM is also funding clinical trials to help repair vision loss and to help people recovering from a stroke.

Paving the way for a treatment for dementia

/ Kevin McCormack / Leave a comment
What happens in a stroke

When someone has a stroke, the blood flow to the brain is blocked. This kills some nerve cells and injures others. The damaged nerve cells are unable to communicate with other cells, which often results in people having impaired speech or movement.

While ischemic and hemorrhagic strokes affect large blood vessels and usually produce recognizable symptoms there’s another kind of stroke that is virtually silent. A ‘white’ stroke occurs in blood vessels so tiny that the impact may not be noticed. But over time that damage can accumulate and lead to a form of dementia and even speed up the progression of Alzheimer’s disease.

Now Dr. Tom Carmichael and his team at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA have developed a potential treatment for this, using stem cells that may help repair the damage caused by a white stroke. This was part of a CIRM-funded study (DISC2-12169 – $250,000).

Instead of trying to directly repair the damaged neurons, the brain nerve cells affected by a stroke, they are creating support cells called astrocytes, to help stimulate the body’s own repair mechanisms.

In a news release, Dr. Irene Llorente, the study’s first author, says these astrocytes play an important role in the brain.

“These cells accomplish many tasks in repairing the brain. We wanted to replace the cells that we knew were lost, but along the way, we learned that these astrocytes also help in other ways.”

The researchers took skin tissue and, using the iPSC method (which enables researchers to turn cells into any other kind of cell in the body) turned it into astrocytes. They then boosted the ability of these astrocytes to produce chemical signals that can stimulate healing among the cells damaged by the stroke.

These astrocytes were then not only able to help repair some of the damaged neurons, enabling them to once again communicate with other neurons, but they also helped another kind of brain cell called oligodendrocyte progenitor cells or OPCs. These cells help make a protective sheath around axons, which transmit electrical signals between brain cells. The new astrocytes stimulated the OPCs into repairing the protective sheath around the axons.

Mice who had these astrocytes implanted in them showed improved memory and motor skills within four months of the treatment.  

And now the team have taken this approach one step further. They have developed a method of growing these astrocytes in large amounts, at very high quality, in a relatively short time. The importance of that is it means they can produce the number of cells needed to treat a person.

“We can produce the astrocytes in 35 days,” Llorente says. “This process allows rapid, efficient, reliable and clinically viable production of our therapeutic product.”

The next step is to chat with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to see what else they’ll need to do to show they are ready for a clinical trial.

The study is published in the journal Stem Cell Research.

/ Kevin McCormack / 1 Comment

Two voices, one message, watch out for predatory stem cell clinics

Last week two new papers came out echoing each other about the dangers of bogus “therapies” being offered by predatory stem cell clinics and the risks they pose to patients.

The first was from the Pew Charitable Trusts entitled: ‘Harms Linked to Unapproved Stem Cell Interventions Highlight Need for Greater FDA Enforcement’ with a subtitle: ‘Unproven regenerative medical products have led to infections, disabilities, and deaths.’

That pretty much says everything you need to know about the report, and in pretty stark terms; need for greater FDA enforcement and infections, disabilities and deaths.

Just two days later, as if in response to the call for greater enforcement, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) came out with its own paper titled: ‘Important Patient and Consumer Information About Regenerative Medicine Therapies.’ Like the Pew report the FDA’s paper highlighted the dangers of unproven and unapproved “therapies” saying it “has received reports of blindness, tumor formation, infections, and more… due to the use of these unapproved products.”

The FDA runs down a list of diseases and conditions that predatory clinics claim they can cure without any evidence that what they offer is even safe, let alone effective. It says Regenerative Medicine therapies have not been approved for the treatment of:

  • Arthritis, osteoarthritis, rheumatism, hip pain, knee pain or shoulder pain.
  • Blindness or vision loss, autism, chronic pain or fatigue.
  • Neurological conditions like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
  • Heart disease, lung disease or stroke.

The FDA says it has warned clinics offering these “therapies” to stop or face the risk of legal action, and it warns consumers: “Please know that if you are being charged for these products or offered these products outside of a clinical trial, you are likely being deceived and offered a product illegally.”

It tells consumers if you are offered one of these therapies – often at great personal cost running into the thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars – you should contact the FDA at ocod@fda.hhs.gov.

The Pew report highlights just how dangerous these “therapies” are for patients. They did a deep dive into health records and found that between 2004 and September 2020 there were more than 360 reported cases of patients experiencing serious side effects from a clinic that offered unproven and unapproved stem cell procedures.

Those side effects include 20 deaths as well as serious and even lifelong disabilities such as:

  • Partial or complete blindness (9).
  • Paraplegia (1).
  • Pulmonary embolism (6).
  • Heart attack (5).
  • Tumors, lesions, or other growths (16).
  • Organ damage or failure in several cases that resulted in death.

More than one hundred of the patients identified had to be hospitalized.

The most common type of procedures these patients were given were stem cells taken from their own body and then injected into their eye, spine, hip, shoulder, or knee. The second most common was stem cells from a donor that were then injected.

The Pew report cites the case of one California-based stem cell company that sold products manufactured without proper safety measures, “including a failure to properly screen for communicable diseases such as HIV and hepatitis B and C.” Those products led to at least 13 people being hospitalized due to serious bacterial infection in Texas, Arizona, Kansas, and Florida.

Shocking as these statistics are, the report says this is probably a gross under count of actual harm caused by the bogus clinics. It says the clinics themselves rarely report adverse events and many patients don’t report them either, unless they are so serious that they require medical intervention.

The Pew report concludes by saying the FDA needs more resources so it can more effectively act against these clinics and shut them down when necessary. It says the agency needs to encourage doctors and patients to report any unexpected side effects, saying: “devising effective strategies to collect more real-world evidence of harm can help the agency in its efforts to curb the growth of this unregulated market and ensure that the regenerative medicine field develops into one that clinicians and patients can trust and safely access.”

We completely support both reports and will continue to work with the FDA and anyone else opposed to these predatory clinics. You can read more here about what we have been doing to oppose these clinics, and here is information that will help inform your decision if you are thinking about taking part in a stem cell clinical trial but are not sure if it’s a legitimate one.

CIRM funded stem cell therapy could one day help stroke and dementia patients

/ Yimy Villa / 3 Comments
Image Description: Microscope images showing brain tissue that has been damaged by white matter stroke (left) and then repaired by the new glial cell therapy (right). Myelin (seen in red), is a substance that protects the connections between neurons and is lost due to white matter stroke. As seen at right, the glial cell therapy (green) restores lost myelin and improves connections in the brain. | Credit: UCLA Broad Stem Cell Research Center/Science Translational Medicine

Dementia is a general term that describes problems with memory, attention, communication, and physical coordination. One of the major causes of dementia is white matter strokes, which occurs when multiple strokes (i.e. a lack of blood supply to the brain) gradually damages the connecting areas of the brain (i.e. white matter).

Currently, there are no therapies capable of stopping the progression of white matter strokes or enhancing the brain’s limited ability to repair itself after they occur.

However, a CIRM-funded study ($2.09 million) conducted by S. Thomas Carmichael, M.D., Ph.D. and his team at UCLA showed that a one-time injection of an experimental stem cell therapy can repair brain damage and improve memory function in mice with conditions that mimic human strokes and dementia.

The therapy consists of glial cells, which are a special type of cell present in the central nervous system that surround and protect neurons. The glial cells are derived from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCS), stem cells that are derived from skin or blood cells through the process of reprogramming and have the ability to become virtually any type of cell.

Dr. Carmichael and his team injected the newly developed glial cells into the brains of mice that had damage similar to humans in the early to middle stages of dementia. The team found that the cell therapy traveled to the damaged areas of the brain and secreted chemicals that stimulated the brain’s own stem cells to start repairing the damage. This not only limited the progression of damage, but also enhanced the formation of new neural connections and increased the production of myelin, a fatty substance that covers and protects neurons.

In a press release from UCLA, Francesca Bosetti, Ph.D., Pharm.D., Program Director at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Strokes, was optimistic about what these findings could mean for patients with strokes or dementia.

“These preliminary results suggest that glial cell-based therapies may one day help combat the white matter damage that many stroke and vascular dementia patients suffer every year.”

Another interesting finding from this study is that even if the injected cells were eliminated a few months after they had been transplanted, the mice’s recovery was unaffected. The researchers believe that this indicates that the therapy primarily serves as a way to stimulate the brain’s own repair process.

In the same press release, Dr. Carmichael elaborates on this concept.

“Because the cell therapy is not directly repairing the brain, you don’t need to rely on the transplanted cells to persist in order for the treatment to be successful.”

The team is now conducting the additional studies necessary to apply to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for permission to test the therapy in a clinical trial in humans. If the therapy is shown to be safe and effective through clinical trials in humans, the team envisions that it could be used at hospitals as a one-time treatment for people with early signs of white matter stroke.

The full results of this study were published in Science Translational Medicine.

Study shows reduction in brain injury after stroke patients were treated with their own stem cells

/ Yimy Villa / 3 Comments
Illustration showing the mechanism of an ischemic stroke. In an ischemic stroke, blood supply to part of the brain is decreased, leading to dysfunction of that area of the brain. Here, a blood clot is the reason for restricted blood flow.

Stroke is the third leading cause of death and serious long-term disability and affects nearly 800,000 Americans a year, with someone in the U.S. suffering a stroke every 40 seconds. Roughly 87% of all strokes are ischemic strokes, meaning that a clot blocks blood flow to the brain. Unfortunately 90% of those who suffer an ischemic stroke also end up suffering from weakness or paralysis to one side of the body.

A study conducted by Muhammad Haque, Ph.D. and Sean Savitz, M.D. at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) found that treating patients with stem cells from their own bone marrow could lead to a reduction in brain injury after a stroke caused by a blood clot.

For this study, there were 37 patients from ages 18 to 80. While all received the standard stroke treatment and rehabilitation follow-up, 17 patients whose strokes were the most severe received a bone marrow stem cell therapy. To measure any improvement, the UTHealth team used 3D brain imaging of the patients obtained from MRI scans. They used these images to compare changes in white matter of those treated with their own bone marrow stem cells to those who were not treated.

White matter is a specific type of tissue in the brain that is critical for motor function because it is responsible for carrying movement-related information to the spinal cord.

Three months after the stroke, the MRI scans of each patient showed the expected decrease after a stroke. However, scans taken 12 months after the stroke occurred showed an improvement on average in the 17 patients who received bone marrow cell therapy.

In a press release from UTHealth, Dr. Haque elaborates on what these results could mean for developing treamtents for stroke patients.

“We envision that future clinical trials might be directed toward identifying white matter protection or repair as an important mechanistic target of efficacy studies and potency assays for bone marrow cell therapies.”

The full results to this study were published in STEM CELLS Translational Medicine.

Perseverance: from theory to therapy. Our story over the last year – and a half

/ Kevin McCormack / Leave a comment
Some of the stars of our Annual Report

It’s been a long time coming. Eighteen months to be precise. Which is a peculiarly long time for an Annual Report. The world is certainly a very different place today than when we started, and yet our core mission hasn’t changed at all, except to spring into action to make our own contribution to fighting the coronavirus.

This latest CIRM Annual Reportcovers 2019 through June 30, 2020. Why? Well, as you probably know we are running out of money and could be funding our last new awards by the end of this year. So, we wanted to produce as complete a picture of our achievements as we could – keeping in mind that we might not be around to produce a report next year.

Dr. Catriona Jamieson, UC San Diego physician and researcher

It’s a pretty jam-packed report. It covers everything from the 14 new clinical trials we have funded this year, including three specifically focused on COVID-19. It looks at the extraordinary researchers that we fund and the progress they have made, and the billions of additional dollars our funding has helped leverage for California. But at the heart of it, and at the heart of everything we do, are the patients. They’re the reason we are here. They are the reason we do what we do.

Byron Jenkins, former Naval fighter pilot who battled back from his own fight with multiple myeloma

There are stories of people like Byron Jenkins who almost died from multiple myeloma but is now back leading a full, active life with his family thanks to a CIRM-funded therapy with Poseida. There is Jordan Janz, a young man who once depended on taking 56 pills a day to keep his rare disease, cystinosis, under control but is now hoping a stem cell therapy developed by Dr. Stephanie Cherqui and her team at UC San Diego will make that something of the past.

Jordan Janz and Dr. Stephanie Cherqui

These individuals are remarkable on so many levels, not the least because they were willing to be among the first people ever to try these therapies. They are pioneers in every sense of the word.

Sneha Santosh, former CIRM Bridges student and now a researcher with Novo Nordisk

There is a lot of information in the report, charting the work we have done over the last 18 months. But it’s also a celebration of everyone who made it possible, and our way of saying thank you to the people of California who gave us this incredible honor and opportunity to do this work.

We hope you enjoy it.

Can stem cells help people who have had a stroke? Ask the experts.

/ Kevin McCormack / Leave a comment

Stroke is the third leading cause of death and disability in the US. Every 45 seconds someone in the US has a stroke. Every year around 275,000 people die from a stroke many more survive but are often impaired by the brain attack. The impact is not just physical, but psychological and emotional. It takes an enormous toll on individuals and their families. So, it’s not surprising that there is a lot of research underway to try and find treatments to help people, including using stem cells.

That’s why CIRM is hosting a special Facebook Live ‘Ask the Stem Cell Team About Stroke event on Wednesday, March 25th at noon PDT. Just head over to our Facebook Page on the 25th at noon to hear from two great guests.

We will be joined by Dr. Tom Carmichael, a Professor of Neurology and the Co-Director of the UCLA Broad Stem Cell Center. He has a number of CIRM grants focused on helping repair the damage caused by strokes.

CIRM Senior Science Officer, Dr. Lila Collins, will also join us to talk about other stem cell research targeting stroke, its promise and some of the problems that still need to be overcome.

You will have a chance to ask questions of both our experts, either live on the day or by sending us questions in advance at info@cirm.ca.gov.

How quitting smoking helps your lungs regenerate; a discovery could lead to new ways to repair damaged lungs; and encouraging news in a stroke recovery trial

/ Kevin McCormack / Leave a comment
Photo courtesy Lindsay Fox

Smoking is one of the leading causes of preventable death not just in the US, but worldwide. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tobacco causes an estimated seven million deaths around the world, every single year. And for every person who dies, another 30 live with a serious smoking-related illness. Clearly quitting is a good idea. Now a new study adds even more incentive to do just that.

Scientists at the Welcome Trust Sanger Institute and University College London in the UK, found that quitting smoking did more than just stop further damage to the lungs. They found that cells in the lining of the lungs that were able to avoid being damaged, were able to regrow and repopulate the lung, helping repair damaged areas.

In an article in Science Daily Dr Peter Campbell, a joint senior author of the study, said: “People who have smoked heavily for 30, 40 or more years often say to me that it’s too late to stop smoking — the damage is already done. What is so exciting about our study is that it shows that it’s never too late to quit — some of the people in our study had smoked more than 15,000 packs of cigarettes over their life, but within a few years of quitting many of the cells lining their airways showed no evidence of damage from tobacco.”

The study is published in the journal Nature.

Researchers at UCLA have also made a discovery that could help people with lung disease.

They examined the lungs of people with cancer and compared them to the lungs of healthy people. They were able to identify a group of molecules, called the Wnt/beta-catenin signaling pathway, that appear to influence the activity of stem cells that are key to maintaining healthy lungs. Too much activity can tilt the balance away from healthy lungs to ones with mutations that are more prone to developing tumors.

In a news release Dr. Brigitte Gomperts, the lead author of the study, says although this work has only been done in mice so far it has tremendous potential: “We think this could help us develop a new therapy that promotes airway health. This could not only inform the treatment of lung cancer, but help prevent its progression in the first place.”

The study is published in the journal Cell Reports.

CIRM has funded some of Dr. Gomperts earlier work in this area.

And there’s encouraging news for people trying to recover from a stroke. Results from ReNeuron’s Phase 2 clinical trial show the therapy appears to help people who have experienced some level of disability following a stroke.

ReNeuron says its CTX therapy – made from neural stem cells – was given to 23 people who had moderate to severe disability resulting from an ischemic stroke. The patients were, on average, seven months post stroke.

In the study, published in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, researchers used the Modified Rankin Scale (mRS), a measure of disability and dependence to assess the impact of the therapy. The biggest improvements were seen in a group of 14 patients who had limited movement of one arm.

  • 38.5% experienced at least a one-point improvement on mRS six months after being treated.
  • 50% experienced a one-point improvement 12 months after being treated.

If that doesn’t seem like a big improvement, then consider this. Moving from an mRS 3 to 2 means that a person with a stroke regains their ability to live independently.

The therapy is now being tested in a larger patient group in the PISCES III clinical trial.

The Top CIRM Blogs of 2019

/ Kevin McCormack / 3 Comments

This year the most widely read blog was actually one we wrote back in 2018. It’s the transcript of a Facebook Live: “Ask the Stem Cell Team” event about strokes and stroke recovery. Because stroke is the third leading cause of death and disability in the US it’s probably no surprise this blog has lasting power. So many people are hoping that stem cells will help them recover from a stroke.

But of the blogs that we wrote and posted this year there’s a really interesting mix of topics.

The most read 2019 blog was about a potential breakthrough in the search for a treatment for type 1 diabetes (T1D).  Two researchers at UC San Francisco, Dr. Matthias Hebrok and Dr. Gopika Nair developed a new method of replacing the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas that are destroyed by type 1 diabetes. 

Dr. Matthias Hebrok
Dr. Gopika Nair

Dr. Hebrok described it as a big advance saying: “We can now generate insulin-producing cells that look and act a lot like the pancreatic beta cells you and I have in our bodies. This is a critical step towards our goal of creating cells that could be transplanted into patients with diabetes.”

It’s not too surprising a blog about type 1 diabetes was at the top. This condition affects around 1.25 million Americans, a huge audience for any potential breakthrough. However, the blog that was the second most read is the exact opposite. It is about a rare disease called cystinosis. How rare? Well, there are only around 500 children and young adults in the US, and just 2,000 worldwide diagnosed with this condition.  

It might be rare but its impact is devastating. A genetic mutation means children with this condition lack the ability to clear an amino acid – cysteine – from their body. The buildup of cysteine leads to damage to the kidneys, eyes, liver, muscles, pancreas and brain.

Dr. Stephanie Cherqui

UC San Diego researcher Dr. Stephanie Cherqui and her team are taking the patient’s own blood stem cells and, in the lab, genetically re-engineering them to correct the mutation, then returning the cells to the patient. It’s hoped this will create a new, healthy blood system free of the disease.

Dr. Cherqui says if it works, this could help not just people with cystinosis but a wide array of other disorders: “We were thrilled that the stem cells and gene therapy worked so well to prevent tissue degeneration in the mouse model of cystinosis. This discovery opened new perspectives in regenerative medicine and in the application to other genetic disorders. Our findings may deliver a completely new paradigm for the treatment of a wide assortment of diseases including kidney and other genetic disorders.”

Sickled cells

The third most read blog was about another rare disease, but one that has been getting a lot of media attention this past year. Sickle cell disease affects around 100,000 Americans, mostly African Americans. In November the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Oxbryta, a new therapy that reduces the likelihood of blood cells becoming sickle shaped and clumping together – causing blockages in blood vessels.

But our blog focused on a stem cell approach that aims to cure the disease altogether. In many ways the researchers in this story are using a very similar approach to the one Dr. Cherqui is using for cystinosis. Genetically correcting the mutation that causes the problem, creating a new, healthy blood system free of the sickle shaped blood cells.

Two other blogs deserve honorable mentions here as well. The first is the story of James O’Brien who lost the sight in his right eye when he was 18 years old and now, 25 years later, has had it restored thanks to stem cells.

The fifth most popular blog of the year was another one about type 1 diabetes. This piece focused on the news that the CIRM Board had awarded more than $11 million to Dr. Peter Stock at UC San Francisco for a clinical trial for T1D. His approach is transplanting donor pancreatic islets and parathyroid glands into patients, hoping this will restore the person’s ability to create their own insulin and control the disease.

2019 was certainly a busy year for CIRM. We are hoping that 2020 will prove equally busy and give us many new advances to write about. You will find them all here, on The Stem Cellar.