What are the prospects of stem cell therapy for neurology?

doi:10.1136/bmj.a1934

Published 28 November 2008, doi:10.1136/bmj.a1934
Cite this as: BMJ 2008;337:a1934

Analysis

What are the prospects of stem cell therapy for neurology?

Siddharthan Chandran, consultant neurologist

¹ Anne McLaren Laboratory for Regenerative Medicine and Cambridge Centre for Brain Repair, Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 0SZ

sc222@cam.ac.uk

Effective treatments for neurological diseases have proved elusive.Siddharthan Chandran examines the potential of stem cells toprovide the answers

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The use of stem cells for regenerative medicine has capturedthe public’s imagination and fuelled rising expectationsof clinical benefit. Clinicians increasingly need to managepatients’ expectations of what stem cells may, or indeedmay not, offer. This article examines some key problems thatneed to be resolved before the promise of stem cells for regenerativeneurology can be realised.

Regenerative medicine is not a new discipline. It can be summarisedas treatments that seek to restore structure and function afterinjury and, by this definition, includes solid organ transplantation.Stem cells are routinely used in haematology (blood stem cellsfor malignancy), plastic surgery (cultured autologous keratinocytesfor skin loss or burns), and orthopaedics (autologous chondrocytetransplantation for articular cartilage defects¹). But theirpotential in many other conditions has yet to be realised. Thelack of restorative treatment for patients with progressiveneurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, multiple. . . [Full text of this article]