First-of-its-kind trial enables paralysed man to stand via stem cell injection
38 comments
·March 24, 2025lambdaone
adamtaylor_13
It wasn’t clear from the article: how do you naturally recover from a spinal cord injury? I’m assuming we can’t be talking about a fully severed spinal cord.
Is it common to recover from a spinal cord injury that leads to some sort of paralysis?
bobmcnamara
Common? No idea.
I witnessed someone paralyzed from cervical radiculopathy in the neck caused by youthful horseplay. Full recovery within a month. Scared us all when he went limp.
chrisweekly
Nerves do regrow, just very very slowly.
pedalpete
Nerves do regrow, but not from the spinal cord as I understand it, and just because they regrow does not mean they regrow along the path which is needed to repair function.
My father broke his Bricial Plexis (the nerves running through your shoulder to your arm). There was an 18 hour surgery to re-trace the path for the nerves to grow. Some nerves made a connection, and he has minimal movement in his fingers. However, most of his arm is still paralyzed.
ainiriand
I got the ear nerve almost severed as a kid and I am still 100% deaf from that ear, it's been 30 years already.
mb7733
The man in question can and did stand, no 'possibly' about it.
This statement a specific case is different than the probability of it working in general.
RIMR
> The man in question can and did stand, no 'possibly' about it.
Nobody said otherwise. It's still very true that this treatment only possibly enabled him to stand.
From the article:
>Larger trials will be needed to establish whether the improvements observed in the two individuals in the current study were a result of the treatment.
delfinom
Easy way to eliminate the possibly.
Stop the immunosuppressant pills and see what happens.
bufferoverflow
2015: Human embryonic stem cells in the treatment of patients with spinal cord injury
kylehotchkiss
How does a stem cell with somebody else's DNA not trigger your own immune system? I'd understand if you could repurpose your own bone marrow (which is a type of stem cell, right?) or neurological stem cells, but I'd sort of expect the immune system to reject others similar to a bad organ transplant or wrong blood type transfusion.
y-c-o-m-b
From the article:
> Recipients were given immune-suppressing drugs to prevent their bodies from attacking the cells for six months after the surgery.
dyauspitr
Seems like it would need to be lifelong because those cells end up differentiating and fixing the damage so they will always be in there.
umpalumpaaa
Immunosuppressive or immune modulating drugs are not that bad. Usually people can take them without too much issues. Yes: Your risk for cancer increases a bit and you have to be careful to not get sick etc. but overall its not that bad.
Most people who have autoimmune diseases also need to take those drugs usually for life – (smaller dosages but still)...
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trollbridge
It would seem worthwhile to bank things like umbilical cord blood so that if these therapies work in the future, you have a supply of your own cells. Immunosuppressive therapy isn’t that fun.
kylehotchkiss
That would be cool, being able to generate stem cells with your own DNA dynamically later in life would be cooler (please pardon my elementary biology approach to this, I know that is an an Everest sized mountain to climb)
tempestn
There are companies now offering stem cell culturing and storage from adult samples. Something I've been meaning to look into actually.
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sharpshadow
That’s truly amazing! Maybe someday we can heal brain damage his way.
CommanderData
Could a bio compatible gel containing steroids not work instead of systemically giving steroids?
dinkblam
sorry, slightly offtopic: does anyone have any experience or can recommend good clinics (in europe) for doing stem-cell therapy for lower back pain (damaged discs)?
busymom0
Isn't Ronnie Coleman also going through this to be able to walk again?
narrator
There was some guy on reddit 10 years ago who got stem cell injections in China and was able to walk after being paralyzed and posted about it. Almost everyone on the thread gaslighted him that he must have never actually been paralyzed or was lying. The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.
dadjoker
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Possibly enables him to stand, according to the article - several other patients weren't helped by the treatment, and in the case that showed a positive effect the researchers currently can't eliminate the possibility of natural recovery causing the improvement.
But it's promising work, shows the treatment seems at least to be safe, and more research will no doubt follow to clarify this.