stem cell research and therapy

at city of hope, dr. karen aboody is seeingexciting results in clinical trials with cancer patients. she's using stem cells to treatbrain tumors. i do stem cell research novel approaches totreat cancer, invasive and metastatic cancer with stem cells and what we've discoveredis that stem cells, brain stem cells, have a natural ability to find invasive tumor sitesin the brain. so if the surgeon cuts out the main tumor, the surgeons going to miss invasivecells that have already moved out into the rest of the brain. how do you treat thosecells without destroying the whole brain? so what we found is that our stem cells, ifwe inject them in the brain, they will actually find those invasive tumor sites. so we areloading them with different therapeutic payloads

to target the tumor cells with. we are lookingat localized chemotherapy protection so that you're only localizing the chemotherapy tothe tumor sites and not the rest of the body. the way chemotherapy works is it gets administeredintravenously and it kills anything in the body that's dividing quickly and the reasonpeople lose their hair, have trouble with their skin, their bone marrow, is cause thesechemo drugs are toxic to anything that's dividing quickly, the tumor and your normal cells.so that's why there are so many side effects, devastating side effects; sometimes they arejust as bad as the diagnosis. what we want to do is instead of getting the chemo throughthe whole body, give it, trigger the chemo only at the tumor sites. therefore, you wouldonly be hitting the tumor and not affecting

the rest of the body. we've actually justcompleted last month our first safety feasibility study at city of hope, that was about 15 patients.we injected the stem cells right into the brain, so we actually have proof of conceptthat the stem cells are converting the chemo locally at the brain tumor sites. i'm hopingto hit a homerun here. we have gotten 18 million dollars from the california institute of regenerativemedicine to go to clinical trial next year with another enzyme prodrug treatment. thisis a drug used for many different types of cancer ovarian, colon. we have preclinicaldata that show these stem cells will migrate to a metastatic site metastatic cells thatare in the lung, in the ovaries, or the bone marrow, they will also cross to the brain.one of the big problems with chemotherapy

is it doesn't cross to the brain. it's prevented,our stem cells can cross over. i discovered this about 18 years ago and was very passionateabout it. there's a lot of negative comments about it at first and people didn't buy intoit. sometimes the time has to come and fortunately after we published this work in 2000 manyother labs have repeated a lot of the work with other types of neuro stem cells so it'snot just the cell line that i have. stem cells can be applied to any medical condition, diabetes,alzheimer's cardiac problems. stem cells know how to make normal tissue. when you're anembryo developing into a person, these stem cells know how to make brain, blood, bonemarrow, heart, liver, so what we're trying to take advantage of what they already knowhow to do but can we take these stem cells,

put them in an adult patient that has damagedtissue and will the stem cells know how to regenerate the tissue or stimulate the bodyto heal itself. so many people our using it for regeneration. so when you stroke and youlose part of your brain, can you put brain stem cell in and will they remake the brainand the connections. very exciting, there's several trials with that right now. for ourpurposes we know that they're pathotropic, that these stem cells find pathology, that'swhat they do, they want to try to heal everything and we just need our stem cells to go in anddeliver the drug and get out. a lot of people want them to stay, to repair spinal cord injury,i think a breakthrough in any one field in any one of they trials that are ongoing nowwill make a huge difference and give the inspiration

to keep going with the rest but i definitelythink that they're making a lot of progress with diabetes and with cardiac and with parkinson's.something should hit soon, i hope and we're all looking at each others trials and learningfrom them. it's an exciting time to be a research scientist and it's an exciting time to bein medicine. next in our stem cell research briefing, a top israeli stem cell researcher.