Stem-cell surgery shows promise
Some words spark debate every time they are spoken, few more surely than “stem cells.” Many ordinary people who smile on the possible outcome of stem-cell research, namely the Regeneration of failed or injured body parts, frown on obtaining stem cells from embryos grown in a lab.
Those conflicted individuals may want to make a date to watch the next installment of “Innovation,” a special eight-part series being presented by PBS. The latest story is called “Miracle Cell,” and the compelling hour airs Tuesday night on Mississippi Public Broadcasting.
“Miracle Cell” makes a case for regenerative medicine, and it does so within many people’s boundaries of acceptance.
Viewers will meet patients who have enjoyed varying degrees of recovery from previously irreversible injuries. Their recoveries have been attributed to interventions using stem cells harvested not from lab-grown embryos but from the patients’ own bodies.
“You don’t have the controversy or the rejection,” says Joy Veron, a 30-something Texas schoolteacher and mother of three who suffered a spinal cord injury when she threw herself in front of an SUV carrying her children. The vehicle was about to roll over a cliff and into a canyon, and Veron says she jumped in front of it hoping to stop it or “at least slow it down.”
“I felt it start to pull me under,” she says by phone from her home in Texas. “The underside of the SUV hit me twice, and on the third hit, I felt my back break. At that point, I went flat, and the rear tire rolled over the length of my body,” squashing internal organs and bones. “They tell me that the only thing that saved my life was that I had my head turned, and the tire missed it.”
For the record, the SUV did not plunge into a canyon, and Veron’s children were uninjured. Her father was able to reach the vehicle and brake it in time. She says she remembers, as she lay crippled on the ground, her dad asking, “Joy, what were you thinking?”
“I guess I wasn’t thinking,” she says.
Others featured in the hour are 19-year-old quadriplegic Laura Dominguez and Michigan teenager Dimitri Bonnville, whose heart was punctured in a frightening accident.
The women both received stem-cell transplants in a procedure not yet approved here by the FDA; their surgeries were performed by Dr. Carlos Lima at the Egas Moniz Hospital in Lisbon, Portugal, where he and his team harvested stem cells from the patients’ noses for transplant into spinal lesions. Veron tells us her spinal-cord gap was four centimeters long (about 1½ inches), “Much longer than the MRI showed,” she says. Veron and Dominguez are among perhaps a dozen patients whose conditions have been affected favorably by a process that would seem too simple to be legitimate.
It’s important to know that the cells used in Lima’s procedure are among those produced by every human body over a lifetime, their purpose being to repair a couple of hundred different types of cells in our own bodies. The ability to use and manipulate these cells would appear to be revolutionizing medicine.
The Michigan teen’s physician, Dr. William O’Neill, director of cardiovascular disease at Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Mich., chose stem cell treatment of a different sort for young Bonnville. In this case, bone marrow cells from the boy’s hip were injected in solution directly into his heart, which had been punctured by a three-inch nail. The boy most certainly would have died, and angiography clearly shows rigid, “dead” areas of his heart prior to the stem-cell treatment. Flexibility is restored after treatment, and the young man is recovering, doing quite well.
Veron admits that her case has “been a slow process, but I have had increased sensation,” she says. “The biggest improvement (over the nine months since the surgery) has been in my left leg. It was icy cold; the right was always warmer and stronger. Now the left is stronger than the right, and that is hugely significant.
“I’m also feeling more pain, but pain receptors are the first to regenerate, so it’s good.” It is the path most often seen.
As for Dominguez, her recovery has been remarkable. This young woman, left a quadriplegic after an accident, underwent surgery like Veron’s in Portugal. Two months later, she not only was able to stand but to raise up on tiptoe and to move her foot on command.
“I’d have the surgery again in a heartbeat,” Veron says and then adds that she hopes the procedure soon will be approved in the United States. “The FDA wanted one more trial with rats, then they said they would review it.”
“Miracle Cell” may do nothing to hasten that review, but the scientists who are interviewed about their work with these mysterious human cells offer a promise of a better future for victims of incapacitating illness and injury.
