Cells taken from a deadly tumour and retrained to become brain cells have been safely used to treat stroke patients, doctors have said. Only about half of the patients improved, but the study shows the method is safe and strengthens the idea that brain cell transplants can be used to help stroke patients recover, the team at the University of Pittsburgh said. Dr. Douglas Kondziolka, a professor of neurological surgery at the University of Pittsburgh who helped lead the study, said in a telephone interview. In a first study we are trying to get to first base. Kondziolka's team experimented on 12 stroke patients, all of whom had fairly serious brain damage.
Strokes can cause problems with speech, hearing, movement and learning.
All got injections of the cells, which started out as cancer cells but were transformed into nerve cells using technology patented by researchers who formed a private company called Layton BioScience in Atherton, California. Just under six months later, six of the 12 patients had improved scores on standard measures of stroke effects, Kondziolka's team reported in the journal Neurology. All of the nine men and three women, who ranged in age from 44 to 74 years, had an unusual type of stroke called a basal ganglia stroke. Kondziolka said these patients were chosen because such a stroke usually damages a small, contained area of cells. Importantly, none of the patients developed cancer.