First Clinical Trial of Embryonic Stem Cell Treatment Moves Forward

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave the go-ahead last week to Geron, a Northern California-based biotechnology company, to begin clinical trials of GRNOPC1, an embryonic stem cell treatment for paralysis.

Patients at seven medical centers around the country will participate in the research, which should begin in a month or so. It will be the first-ever trial of embryonic stem cell therapy on humans, and it's a development that could have a potential impact on the health of aging boomers.

The treatment is based on the work of University of California-Irvine researcher Hans Keirstead. Here's my just-published Orange Coast magazine article about Keirstead, who startled the world a few years back by using embryonic stem cell treatments to enable paralyzed rats to walk--and who is hoping to someday soon do the same for humans suffering from spinal cord injuries.

But as Keirstead told me in an interview, spinal cord injuries are really just the start for him.

"Remember, the way that the central nervous system degenerates is the same, regardless of the trigger, whether it's a spinal cord injury or a disease," he says. "It sets off the same sequence of events. That means that if you develop a treatment for one condition and get the biology working for it, you can leverage that and translate it into treating other diseases, as well."

Thus, if the stem cell treatment helps paralysis patients, there's a good chance that it also may help those with aging-associated neurological diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

As Judy Salerno, a National Institute on Aging official, testified to Congress in 2004, the incidence of Alzheimer's is projected to spike after 2030, as the last of the baby boomers reach the age of 65. By the year 2050, the number of Americans with the incapacitating and ultimately fatal brain-wasting disease could roughly triple, to 13.2 million. Other UCI researchers, led by neuroscientist Frank LaFerla, have discovered that Parkinson's and Alzheimer's can act as a sort of double whammy. In instances when the proteins from the two diseases combine, the result is a dramatic decline in cognition.

Here's a recent National Public Radio interview with Keirstead and other scientists about the progress and potential value of embryonic stem cell therapies.