Widecells Group CSO Professor Peter Hollands provides his analysis of what is being widely reported as “a major breakthrough” in the treatment of Multiple Sclerosis using stem cell transplants:
It’s always fantastic to see this type of story, where stem cells have allowed a patient to make a genuinely dramatic recovery.
The BBC report features an interview with Louise Willetts, a 36-year-old Multiple Sclerosis (MS) sufferer who is now symptom-free following a haemopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) as part of a global clinical trial.
MS is a truly horrible disease in which malfunctioning white blood cells in a patient’s bone marrow attack the central nervous system.
The HSCT treatment relies on the use of chemotherapy to completely destroy the patient’s bone marrow, followed by transplantation of stem cells to rebuild it.
This makes it a highly invasive, life-threatening procedure – perhaps the most aggressive known in clinical medicine. This raises the question of whether it is worth the risk for patients suffering from MS – which is rarely fatal — compared to other, less-intensive stem cell treatments.
The dangerous nature of the procedure means that the criteria for patient suitability are unclear. Would it be better to choose a 25-year-old patient, whose symptoms are mild but who is likely to survive the HSCT, or a 70-year-old with complications who could benefit greatly but may pass away? There is no obvious answer to this question.
While the results of this trial are positive – only three of 50 transplants failed, which is a very good success rate – the use of HSCTs for MS treatment still has too many questions hanging over it currently, and I think there are other, much safer stem cell treatments that are more suitable.
I’m delighted for Ms Willetts – but I don’t think this is quite the “game changer” that the BBC has billed it as.
