osteoarthritis

Researchers develop a stem cell-based implant for cartilage restoration and treating osteoarthritis

/ Esteban Cortez / 3 Comments
The Plurocart’s scaffold membrane seeded with stem cell-derived chondrocytes. Image courtesy of USC Photo/Denis Evseenko.

THIS BLOG IS ALSO AVAILABLE AS AN AUDIO CAST

Researchers at the Keck School of Medicine of USC have used a stem cell-based bio-implant to repair cartilage and delay joint degeneration in a large animal model. This paves the way to potentially treat humans with cartilage injuries and osteoarthritis, which occurs when the protective cartilage at the ends of the bones wears down over time. The disorder affects millions worldwide.

 The researchers are using this technology to manufacture the first 64 implants to be tested on humans with support from a $6 million grant from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM).

Researchers Dr. Denis Evseenko, and Dr. Frank Petrigliano led the development of the therapeutic bio-implant, called Plurocart. It’s composed of a scaffold membrane seeded with stem cell-derived chondrocytes, the cells responsible for producing and maintaining healthy articular cartilage tissue. 

In the study, the researchers implanted the Plurocart membrane into a pig model of osteoarthritis, resulting in the long-term repair of articular cartilage defects. Evseenko said the findings are significant because the implant fully integrated in the damaged articular cartilage tissue and survived for up to six months. “Previous studies have not been able to show survival of an implant for such a long time,” Evseenko added.

The researchers also found that the cartilage tissue generated was strong enough to withstand compression and elastic enough to accommodate movement without breaking.

Osteoarthritis, an often-painful disorder, can affect any joint, but most commonly affects those in our knees, hips, hands and spine. The USC researchers hope their implant will help prevent the development of arthritis and alleviate the need for invasive joint replacement surgeries.

“Many of the current options for cartilage injury are expensive, involve complex logistical planning, and often result in incomplete regeneration,” said Petrigliano. “Plurocart represents a practical, inexpensive, one-stage therapy that may be more effective in restoring damaged cartilage and improve the outcome of such procedures.”

Read the full study here and learn more about the CIRM grant here.

Some good news for people with dodgy knees

/ Kevin McCormack / 1 Comment

THIS BLOG IS ALSO AVAILABLE AS AN AUDIOCAST

Graphic contrasting a healthy knee with one that has osteoarthritis

About 10% of Americans suffer from knee osteoarthritis, a painful condition that can really impair mobility and quality of life. It’s often caused by an injury to cartilage, say when you were playing sports in high school or college, and over time it continues to degenerate and ultimately results in the  loss of both cartilage and bone in the joint.

Current treatments involve either medication to control the pain or surgery. Medication works up to a point, but as the condition worsens it loses effectiveness.  Knee replacement surgery can be effective, but is a serious, complicated procedure with a long recovery time.  That’s why the governing Board of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) voted to invest almost $6 million in an innovative stem cell therapy approach to helping restore articular cartilage in the knee.

Dr. Frank Petrigliano, Chief of the Epstein Family Center for Sports Medicine at Keck Medicine of the University of Southern California (USC), is using pluripotent stem cells to create chondrocytes (the cells responsible for cartilage formation) and then seeding those onto a scaffold. The scaffold is then surgically implanted at the site of damage in the knee. Based on scientific data, the seeded scaffold has the potential to regenerate the damaged cartilage, thus decreasing the likelihood of progression to knee osteoarthritis.  In contrast to current methods, this new treatment could be an off-the-shelf approach that would be less costly, easier to administer, and might also reduce the likelihood of progression to osteoarthritis.

This is a late-stage pre-clinical program. The goals are to manufacture clinical grade product, carry out extensive studies to demonstrate safety of the approach, and then file an IND application with the FDA, requesting permission to test the product in a clinical trial in people.

“Damage to the cartilage in our knees can have a big impact on quality of life,” says Dr. Maria T. Millan, MD, President and CEO of CIRM. “It doesn’t just cause pain, it also creates problems carrying out simple, everyday activities such as walking, climbing stairs, bending, squatting and kneeling. Developing a way to repair or replace the damaged cartilage to prevent progression to knee osteoarthritis could make a major difference in the lives of millions of Americans. This program is a continuation of earlier stage work funded by CIRM at the Basic Biology and Translational stages, illustrating how CIRM supports scientific programs from early stages toward the clinic.”

/ 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.

Stem cell clinics make big claims but offer little evidence they can treat osteoarthritic knees

/ Kevin McCormack / 3 Comments

osteoarthritis knee

If someone says they have a success rate of close to 100 percent in treating a major health problem but offer little evidence to back that up, you might be excused for being more than a tad skeptical. And a new study says you would be right.

The health problem in question is osteoarthritis (OA) of the knee, something that affects almost 10 million Americans. It’s caused by the wearing down of the protective cartilage in the knee. That cartilage acts as a kind of shock absorber, so when it’s gone you have bone rubbing against bone. That’s not just painful but also debilitating, making it hard to lead an active life.

There is a lot of research taking place – including a clinical trial that CIRM is funding – that focuses on using stem cells to create new cartilage, but so far nothing has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for wider use. The reason for that is simple. No approach has yet proven it is both safe and effective.

No evidence? No worries

But that doesn’t stop many clinics around the US, and around the world, from claiming they have treatments that work and charging patients a hefty sum to get them.

In a study presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, researchers contacted 317 clinics in the US that directly market stem cell therapies to consumers. They asked the clinics for information on the cost of the procedure and their success rate.

  • Only 65 clinics responded
  • Lowest price was $1,150
  • Highest price was $12,000,
  • Average price of $5,156.

Only 36 clinics responded with information about success rates.

  • 10 claimed between 90 and 100 percent success
  • 15 claimed 80 to 90 percent success
  • 10 claimed 70 to 80 percent
  • One said just 55 percent.

None offered any evidence based on a clinical trial that supported those claims, and there was no connection between how much they charged and how successful they claimed to be.

In a news release about the study – which appears in the Journal of Knee Surgery – George Muschler, one of the lead authors, said that orthopedic surgeons have a duty to give patients the best information available about all treatment options.

“Recent systematic reviews of cellular therapies for the treatment of knee OA (over 400 papers screened) have found poor levels of evidence for the efficacy of these treatments to date. Current evidence does not justify the rapid rate of growth for these therapies.”

Nicolas Piuzzi, the other lead author on the study, says if the evidence doesn’t justify the growth in the number of clinics offering these therapies, it certainly doesn’t justify the prices they charge.

“The claim of “stem cell” therapy carries a high level of expectations for the potential benefits, but research is still many years away from providing clear evidence of effective treatment to patients. As clinicians and researchers, we have ethical, scientific, legal and regulatory concerns. Patients need to be aware of the status of research within the field. If they receive information from anyone offering a treatment claim of an 80 to 100 percent successful recovery, they should be concerned in observance of published peer-reviewed evidence.”

A shot in the arm for people with bad knees

/ Kevin McCormack / 4 Comments

knee

Almost every day I get an email or phone call from someone asking if we have a stem cell therapy for bad knees. The inquiries are from people who’ve been told they need surgery to replace joints damaged by age and arthritis. They’re not alone. Every year around 600,000 Americans get a knee replacement. That number is expected to rise to three million by 2030.

Up till now my answer to those calls and emails has been ‘I’m sorry, we don’t have anything’. But a new CIRM-funded study from USC stem cell scientist Denis Evseenko says that may not always be the case.

JointCartilege_nancy_liu-824x549

The ability to regenerate joint cartilage cells instead of surgically replacing joints would be a big boon for future patients. (Photo/Nancy Liu, Denis Evseenko Lab, USC Stem Cell)

Evseenko and his team have discovered a molecule they have called Regulator of Cartilage Growth and Differentiation or RCGD 423. This cunning molecule works in two different ways. One is to reduce the inflammation that many people with arthritis have in their joints. The second is to help stimulate the regeneration of the cartilage destroyed by arthritis.

When they tested RCGD 423 in rats with damaged cartilage, the rats cartilage improved. The study is published in the Annals of Rheumatic Diseases.

In an article in USC News, Evseenko, says there is a lot of work to do but that this approach could ultimately help people with osteoarthritis or juvenile arthritis.

“The goal is to make an injectable therapy for an early to moderate level of arthritis. It’s not going to cure arthritis, but it will delay the progression of arthritis to the damaging stages when patients need joint replacements, which account for a million surgeries a year in the U.S.”

CIRM Board invests in three new stem cell clinical trials targeting arthritis, cancer and deadly infections

/ Kevin McCormack / 8 Comments

knee

Arthritis of the knee

Every day at CIRM we get calls from people looking for a stem cell therapy to help them fight a life-threatening or life-altering disease or condition. One of the most common calls is about osteoarthritis, a painful condition where the cartilage that helps cushion our joints is worn away, leaving bone to rub on bone. People call asking if we have something, anything, that might be able to help them. Now we do.

At yesterday’s CIRM Board meeting the Independent Citizens’ Oversight Committee or ICOC (the formal title of the Board) awarded almost $8.5 million to the California Institute for Biomedical Research (CALIBR) to test a drug that appears to help the body regenerate cartilage. In preclinical tests the drug, KA34, stimulated mesenchymal stem cells to turn into chondrocytes, the kind of cell found in healthy cartilage. It’s hoped these new cells will replace those killed off by osteoarthritis and repair the damage.

This is a Phase 1 clinical trial where the goal is primarily to make sure this approach is safe in patients. If the treatment also shows hints it’s working – and of course we hope it will – that’s a bonus which will need to be confirmed in later stage, and larger, clinical trials.

From a purely selfish perspective, it will be nice for us to be able to tell callers that we do have a clinical trial underway and are hopeful it could lead to an effective treatment. Right now the only alternatives for many patients are powerful opioids and pain killers, surgery, or turning to clinics that offer unproven stem cell therapies.

Targeting immune system cancer

The CIRM Board also awarded Poseida Therapeutics $19.8 million to target multiple myeloma, using the patient’s own genetically re-engineered stem cells. Multiple myeloma is caused when plasma cells, which are a type of white blood cell found in the bone marrow and are a key part of our immune system, turn cancerous and grow out of control.

As Dr. Maria Millan, CIRM’s President & CEO, said in a news release:

“Multiple myeloma disproportionately affects people over the age of 65 and African Americans, and it leads to progressive bone destruction, severe anemia, infectious complications and kidney and heart damage from abnormal proteins produced by the malignant plasma cells.  Less than half of patients with multiple myeloma live beyond 5 years. Poseida’s technology is seeking to destroy these cancerous myeloma cells with an immunotherapy approach that uses the patient’s own engineered immune system T cells to seek and destroy the myeloma cells.”

In a news release from Poseida, CEO Dr. Eric Ostertag, said the therapy – called P-BCMA-101 – holds a lot of promise:

“P-BCMA-101 is elegantly designed with several key characteristics, including an exceptionally high concentration of stem cell memory T cells which has the potential to significantly improve durability of response to treatment.”

Deadly infections

The third clinical trial funded by the Board yesterday also uses T cells. Researchers at Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles were awarded $4.8 million for a Phase 1 clinical trial targeting potentially deadly infections in people who have a weakened immune system.

Viruses such as cytomegalovirus, Epstein-Barr, and adenovirus are commonly found in all of us, but our bodies are usually able to easily fight them off. However, patients with weakened immune systems resulting from chemotherapy, bone marrow or cord blood transplant often lack that ability to combat these viruses and it can prove fatal.

The researchers are taking T cells from healthy donors that have been genetically matched to the patient’s immune system and engineered to fight these viruses. The cells are then transplanted into the patient and will hopefully help boost their immune system’s ability to fight the virus and provide long-term protection.

Whenever you can tell someone who calls you, desperately looking for help, that you have something that might be able to help them, you can hear the relief on the other end of the line. Of course, we explain that these are only early-stage clinical trials and that we don’t know if they’ll work. But for someone who up until that point felt they had no options and, often, no hope, it’s welcome and encouraging news that progress is being made.

 

 

Finally a possible use for your excess fat; using it to fix your arthritic knee

/ Kevin McCormack / Leave a comment

shutterstock_425039020

One of the most common questions we get asked at CIRM, almost every other day to be honest, is “are there any stem cell treatments for people with arthritis in their knees?” It’s not surprising. This is a problem that plagues millions of Americans and is one of the leading causes of disability in the US.

Sadly, we have to tell people that there are no stem cell treatments for osteoarthritis (OA) in the knee that have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). There’s also a lack of solid evidence from clinical trials that the various approaches are effective.

But that could be changing. There’s a growing number of clinical trials underway looking at different approaches to treating OA in the knee using various forms of stem cells. Sixteen of those are listed at clinicaltrials.gov. And one new study suggests that just one injection of stem cells may be able to help reduce pain and inflammation in arthritic knees, at least for six months. The operative word here being may.

The study, published in the journal Stem Cells Translational Medicine,  used adipose-derived stromal cells, a kind of stem cell taken from the patient’s own fat. Previous studies have shown that these cells can have immune boosting and anti-scarring properties.

The cells were removed by liposuction, so not only did the patient’s get a boost for their knees they also got a little fat reduction. A nice bonus if desired.

The study was quite small. It involved 18 patients, between the ages of 50 and 75, all of whom had suffered from osteoarthritis (OA) in the knee for at least a year before the treatment. This condition is caused by the cartilage in the knee breaking down, allowing bones to rub against each other, leading to pain, stiffness and swelling.

One group of patients were given a low dose of the cells (23,000) injected directly into the knee, one a medium dose (103,000) and one a high dose (503,000).

Over the next six months, the patients were closely followed to see if there were any side effects and, of course, any improvement in their condition. In a news release, Christian Jorgensen, of University Hospital of Montpellier, the director of the study, said the results were encouraging:

“Although this phase I study included a limited number of patients without a placebo arm we were able to show that this innovative treatment was well tolerated in patients with knee OA and it provided encouraging preliminary evidence of efficacy. Interestingly, patients treated with low-dose ASCs significantly improved in pain and function compared with the baseline.”

The researchers caution that the treatment doesn’t halt the progression of OA and does not restore the damaged cartilage, instead it seems to help patients by reducing inflammation.

In a news article about the study Tony Atala, director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, in Winston-Salem, N.C. and the editor of Stem Cells Translational Medicine said the study offered the patients involved another benefit:

“In fact, most of the patients (in the study group) who had previously scheduled total knee replacement surgery decided to cancel the surgery. It will be interesting to see if these improvements are seen in larger groups of study participants.”

Interesting is an understatement.

But while this is encouraging it’s important to remember it was done in a small group of patients and needs to be replicated in a much larger group before we can draw any solid conclusions. It will also be important to see if the benefits last longer than six months.

We might not have to wait too long for some answers. The researchers are already running a 2-year trial involving 150 people in Europe.

We’ll let you know what they find.