Patent ID: 8460651

Claim:
A method of treating a subject with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) comprising: a) isolating neural stem cells of human origin from a central nervous system tissue that comprises fetal spinal cord tissue; b) expanding in vitro the isolated neural stem cells in a dispersed adherent culture to form an expanded population of neural stem cells, wherein expanding the isolated neural stem cells comprises: i.) providing at least one extracellular protein to a culture vessel, wherein the extracellular protein includes at least about 10 μg/mL of poly-D-lysine and less than about 1 mg/ml fibronectin; ii.) culturing the dissociated neural stem cells in said culture vessel in the absence of serum; iii.) adding to the culture vessel at least one growth factor; and iv.) passaging the cultured cells prior to confluence; c) concentrating the expanded population of neural stem cells to a density of about 1,000 to about 200,000 cells/μL to form concentrated neural stem cells; and d) injecting a therapeutically effective amount of said concentrated neural stem cells into one or more areas of a spinal cord of the subject.