I am Dr. Baker. I’m a board certified neurosurgeon. I’ve trained in prominent institutions like Cleveland Clinic, Louisville, and Johns Hopkins University.
What attracted me in the field of regenerative medicine, being a neurosurgeon, throughout my training, I’ve been told by my mentors, if a person suffers traumatic brain injury,
other than taking the pressure off the brain, there’s not much else you can do to allow the brain to come back to normal function other than basic rehab.
The same was said about patients who suffer spinal cord injury, they’re paralyzed. There’s not much you can do. The same was said about degenerative disc disease.
As we are young, our disc height is high, and we get older. The disc height goes low to the point you are bone on bone.
So the standard response is there is not much you can do until you’re bone on bone and do surgery.
Well, guess what? Regenerative medicine has some new answers that have not been known in the past. We have evidence that patients who undergo stem cell therapy
who have suffered traumatic brain injury do better compared to conventional treatment. A recent study from Mayo done a year ago
revealed 70% improvement in patients who were paraplegic, who underwent intrathecal stem cell therapy. The same is evident on a study that was recently published
that shows the disc height regeneration after stem cell therapy. And the same study also compared operative versus non-operative treatment arm using stem cell therapy,
and the results were equivalent. So this really got me interested in knowing more about non-operative treatment for patients who suffer variety
of conditions and want non-operative treatment that is minimally invasive with great result.
I am Dr. Baker. I’m a board certified neurosurgeon. I’ve trained in prominent institutions like Cleveland Clinic, Louisville, and Johns Hopkins University.
So I get asked this question, what is neuro regeneration? What is immunomodulation and what does it mean to regenerate?
So in essence, if a cell is damaged, like specifically myelin sheep in patients who suffer from multiple sclerosis, that myelin sheep has
to come back to normal function. So if the source of damage, which is uh, T cells, there’s a type of white blood cells that attack
this specific area of the central nervous system that needs to shut down one. Two, you need to do something to make sure that the myelin
that was damaged is now coming back to normal function. So that normalcy is regeneration of the myelin sheep. Now, the body does some of that,
but having a boost with mesenchymal stem cells, specifically coming from the umbilical cord, allows for that to happen. Now, downregulation of the T cells is immunomodulation,
which means you’re controlling the source of damage at the same time you’re allowing the repair of the damaged tissue concurrently.
I am Dr. Baker. I’m a board certified neurosurgeon. I’ve trained in prominent institutions like Cleveland Clinic, Louisville, and Johns Hopkins University.
What is Wharton’s Jelly Warden’s Jelly is a gelatinous substance found within the umbilical cord, acting as a cushioning and insulating material
to protect the blood vessels During fetal development, its main composition includes mu polysaccharides, like hyaluronic acid, chondroitin sulfate, along with water
fibroblast like cells, and extracellular matrix component. This unique composition provides elasticity and support of the umbilical cord vessels ensuring proper blood flow.
Clinically Warden Jelly is valuable in regenerative medicine. For example, rich stem cell content is used in tissue engineering and cell therapy.
A notable article supporting stem cell in Wharton cell was a review done by Rosa, published in stem cells International.
Highlights the stem cell potential for Wharton cell in treating various conditions like osteoarthritis and other autoimmune conditions.
I am Dr. Baker. I’m a board certified neurosurgeon. I’ve trained in prominent institutions like Cleveland Clinic, Louisville, and Johns Hopkins University.
Between the different types of stem cells, which type is superior amongst the various sources. Mesenchymal stem cells derived from umbilical cord tissue
are often considered superior for regenerative purposes due to their higher proliferative capacity, lower immunogenicity and enhanced immunomodulatory property compared to
derived or adipose derived tissue. A notable study published in stem cells translational medicine in 2021 by Wong demonstrated that umbilical cord derived MES stem cells showed greater
efficacy in neuro regeneration and immune regulation, and in preclinical models suggesting they may be most promising source of therapy for MS
and other neurodegenerative diseases.
I am Sophia Bogan. I have a PhD in biomedical engineering and a focus in tissue engineering and generative medicine.
MSTs also highly sophisticated in their ability to communicate with other cell types. They can do it by cell to cell signaling,
peregrine signaling, where they’re not in contact, they’re just delivering biochemical cues and they can influence other cells for good.
They spur this kind of embryonic, early embryonic regeneration, anti-inflammatory property of the body that supports development. They can sense inflammatory molecules, for instance,
and that triggers this intracellular signaling cascade that causes them to then produce a return signal. And it’s usually the opposite effect.
If they’re in an inflammatory environment, they secrete anti-inflammatory cytokines, chemokines growth factors to try to promote a tissue regenerative environment.
Instead, the novelty of MSCs is that they’re also a building block in tissue repair. Tissue repair is gonna need new cells.
Cells that are able to self-renew or or divide, turnover, proliferate. It needs those types of cells to then create a repaired environment.
So the MSCs are kind of that foundation. If you have diseased cells in that area, they can recruit additional stem cells from the
host’s own body. They can recruit stem cells to the area, which will then differentiate into the tissue of interest into the cells of interest.
So rather than just having diseased cells in the area, you recruit other stem cells. MSCs also have the potential to differentiate in their body
and become this healthy cell. MSCs are able to differentiate into terminal form and function cells. This could be cartilage, this could be fat,
this could be connective tissue supporting cells that are able to deposit collagen. Once you have it in that environment, it’s gonna do
what it was intended to do, which is become connective tissue. Its goal was to produce collagen and get set in the area
and really be forming youthful, healthy skin structure.
My name is John Phillips. I am a professor in the Department of Medicine in the division of Hematology, and my background for the last 15 years has been in stem cells.
What I want to do just now is speak to you about what is a stem cell. And really there are multiple different types of stem cells, and we probably have heard about these in the news in various different ways. There was a Nobel Prize that was given to Dr. Yamanaka from Japan several years ago for his work, identifying a method to produce an induced pluripotent stem cell, and that’s a stem cell that can become any other cell.
There are stem cells that are hematopoietic stem cells, and you probably have heard about these hematopoietic stem cells in the course of listening to the news where people that have cancer often get a hematopoietic stem cell transplant, a bone marrow transplant, and those stem cells have the ability to make just blood cells.
There are neuronal stem cells that have the ability to make neurons, and then there are another group of stem cells, they’re called mesenchymal stem cells. And mesenchymal stem cells, there are multiple different sources for them. These stem cells, they have the ability to actually become other types of cells. For example, they can become an adipose cell. They can become a chondrocyte, which is a cell that makes cartilage, for example, in a joint. It’s the environment that these cells are in that direct them to do what they do.
One of the properties of the mesenchymal stem cell, or the MSC, is the fact that it has anti-inflammatory properties, and there are thousands of papers that are out there about the anti-inflammatory molecules that these stem cells send out.
And so you can look at a stem cell as like a little biological factory, and that factory can make lots of different things, but it can make chemokines, interleukins, other molecules that are used by the immune system to tell the immune system what to do, or in this case, what not to do, not to get overly active and not to cause a big inflammatory response.
As we think about stem cells, specifically MSCs, and we say to ourselves, what is an MSC? Where, where do we get these MSCs? There are then multiple sources for MSCs. There are multiple methods of harvesting MSCs from adipose tissue, so you might hear about friends or family members that have had a liposuction procedure. And that material that’s taken out, that adipose tissue that’s taken out is processed in a way so that it releases the mesenchymal stem cells that it holds. You may hear about bone marrow. Bone marrow also has mesenchymal stem cells, and it’s processed in a similar but slightly different manner so that it also will release those mesenchymal stem cells and they can be collected and used for various medical purposes. And then the final source of mesenchymal stem cells that we’re gonna talk about is the umbilical cord. The umbilical cord is a tissue that connects the baby to the placenta, you know, and it’s generally about this long. It can be this long or it can be this long. It has various lengths, but the umbilical cord itself is a very rich source of mesenchymal stem cells.
Isolating those cells, again, it’s a process that we do in the laboratory where we will take away the outer covering of the umbilical cord, take out what we call Wharton Jelly, which is the tissue that surrounds the vessels that bring nutrients back and forth to the fetus. That Wharton’s Jelly is really full of mesenchymal stem cells. That material can then be used for various different things. It’s very good at anti-inflammatory processes, and you may have seen people that, that go in and get MSCs for an autoimmune disease like lupus, for example, or rheumatoid arthritis. There are people that are getting MSCs for forms of diabetes that are induced by an autoimmune response to one of the components of the sugar processing that goes on within a cell. So that process of isolating those cells, be it from bone marrow, adipose tissue or umbilical cord, it varies a little bit, but what you get out is a very homogenous cell population.
And there are some things about these cells that I think are really important to understand. First of all, they have certain markers on the outsides of the cells, sort of like identification markers that are on the outsides of these cells. A lot of times when we look at mesenchymal stem cells, we’re not looking for what’s there. We’re actually looking for what’s not there.
For example, we are looking to make sure that there is no HLA. So HLA is a system that has developed over eons that allows one person to be different from another. And evolutionarily, there’s a lot of reasons why that is a very, very good system to have. It ensures that if some disease or pathogen comes through a population that people have a different genetic makeup so that individuals are not all affected exactly the same. I think a good example of that probably is in the agricultural industry where you see birds will get the bird flu. And because in a poultry farm, all the animals are exactly the same. They all have the same MHC, and when that disease strikes, it wipes out the entire population. And so evolutionarily, by having different MHC, we’re all a little bit more or less susceptible to things, which is a good thing.
Why am I telling you about MHC specifically? I’m speaking about MHC because you probably know that when people get an organ transplant – a heart, a liver, kidney, lung, bone marrow, one of the things that they try to do is, you’ll hear maybe in your community where they have a drive that goes out and it HLA-types everybody in the community so that they can find a donor for a kidney, for example. That’s important because what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to find the best match to what your HLA is so that when they put that organ in, it’s not rejected. There are multiple studies now that have shown the closer that HLA is, the less rejection there is with MSCs.
The really interesting thing about those stem cells, they don’t have HLA, and so you can take cells from one individual or one umbilical cord or one adipose, harvest/process them, and then use those for another individual because there is no HLA on those cells to be rejected.
My name is John Phillips. I am a professor in the Department of Medicine and the Division of Hematology, and my background for the last 15 years has been in stem cells.
So the question came up from the audience, what is cell signaling? Cell signaling is a process that goes on among all cells in the body where they talk to their neighbors or they talk to other cells throughout the body. And there are multiple ways that cells can do this. These signaling pathways are really accomplished by molecules that cells produce. And these molecules, for example, homing molecules, they’re chemokines that tell other immune cells, come to me, I’m at the site of an infection, or I’m at the site of a wound. I’m gonna spit out these chemo kinds that are gonna tell all the other cells, come to me and help me. I need help. I need you to bring your cellular expertise to this area.
And when we think about this, for example, with a wound, you have a cut in your skin. Maybe you know, you went and washed your hands and you think it’s clean, but there’s still a couple of bacteria that are in there. The cells that are right in that vicinity are gonna send out these signaling molecules to tell other professional immune cells like macrophages to come to the area. And macrophages will come to the area and they will recognize that bacteria, for example, as a foreign entity, they’ll come and they’ll do the things that they need to do to neutralize that bacteria so that it doesn’t spread to your whole body and you don’t become septic. You often see that in a wound. You see the result of those cells being called in. The result of that is you might get a little puss out of the wound, and that really is a good thing. That’s all of those immune cells coming to that area and fighting off that infection. That’s what that is. Those are your white blood cells that have come and given up their lives to try to quash this imminent infection. That example is just one of many examples.
There are also signaling molecules that go out and tell other cells to come. If we wanna stick with this idea of the wound, once that bacteria or pathogen has been cleared away, you still have that cut and those cells are telling other cells to come in to remodel that tissue, to bridge that gap, to get cells to grow back together so that that wound heals so that your skin cells will then, you know, find each other on the other sides of this cut, for example, and build new skin cells to replace that barrier that’s been damaged from the cut, or the accident, or whatever has happened.
Another good example that I like to give, because my background is in hematology. I was riding my bike recently and I kind of had a little accident, and um, I have a bruise. And so when you, when I first look at the bruise, I look at the bruise and I say, ah, that’s gonna hurt. The next day, you know, it’s all red and it’s kind of, might be a little bit warm. That’s because all of these professional cells. Now I don’t have any break in my skin, but I have damage below the skin. And that damage below the skin is maybe ruptured tissue, ruptured blood vessels. And some cells have leaked out, some blood cells have leaked out, and now they need to be all cleaned up. And so the first thing that happens in a wound like that is you see it gets a little red, maybe a little bit warm, and a little bit puffy. And then after a couple of days, it kind of starts to turn green. And the reason it turns green is because all those red cells, all your red blood cells that leaked out into the tissue, they’re now being metabolized by all of those other professional immune cells. And the first thing they do is they take the hemoglobin and they take the heme out, and that heme gets broken down into biliverden. And if you remember your language classes, verden is a term for green. The Cape Verde Islands were islands that were identified off the coast of Africa because they were green and all the sailors knew that. So you get that kind of green color that you know that your wound is healing because you see that red is now turning to kind of a greenish color. And then, in a few more days, you’ll see that that greenish color turns to yellow and that yellow color is bilirubin. It’s another breakdown of that heme that goes on within the wound. And you can look at the wound and you know that it’s healing because you see that progression from red to green to kind of yellowish. And then, you know, slowly over time that whole thing fades. The process, that process of, of making the tissue whole again, is due to all of these remodeling cells that come in and all these professional immune cells that come in and do the work that’s necessary to take care of this problem.
As we look at ourselves over time, you probably can recall a time when you were younger and something happened to you, you fell off your bike and you got that bruise, and next thing you know, it didn’t hurt. It was gone two, three days later and you were back to riding your bike full speed, going over jumps, no problem. Right? And then you went to college and you fell off your bike a couple of times in college and you know, it took a little bit longer for that to heal. And now my early sixties, now when I fall off my bike, it really hurts, and it takes, you know, a week or two for me to fully recover back to a hundred percent. And so the question is, why is it that you’re so resilient as a kid? You’re so easily healing, where as a an adult, that healing process takes more time. It’s not that you don’t have the immune system. Many people have, you know, just as robust an immune system when they’re old as when they’re young. It’s the ability of those signaling molecules that we talked about earlier. It’s the ability of those signaling molecules to get all the right things coming in together.
So for example, sometimes inflammation kind of goes awry and you see that more in older people. They have wounds that really don’t wanna heal, and that’s because maybe they’ve made too much of an immune response to whatever this injury is. And now that redness, that puffiness, it gets worse and it stays around rather than for a day or two, it stays around for a week. That immune process of bringing in all the right players to heal that wound doesn’t happen exactly the way we want it to happen. And as a result, we can maybe do things to sort of help us along. We can sort of take NSAIDs, which are drugs meant to control the immune system a little bit. You know, the names of those drugs, you know, I’m sure you take them all the time when you get older, when you have a sore back from riding your bike too much or working out too much or whatever it is that you do in your knee, for example. Those drugs are often used, you know, on a fairly regular basis. When that happens, you are now directing, in some regard, through pharmacology.
One of the questions from the audience was, what about my stem cells specifically as I age? And you know what, I’ll tell you, it relates back to my, when I was in hematology, working in the lab that processed all of the stem cells for the bone marrow transplant program. Obviously the older you get, the less stem cells you have, and that’s very evident it’s possible to get enough stem cells for a bone marrow transplant from an older person. But often the docs have to give drugs to sort of kick those stem cells into high gear to make more of them. And not only that, they also have to give drugs to tell those stem cells to actually leave the bone marrow so that they can be collected. It is a fact that as we age, the number of stem cells that we have sort of declines.
There’s been a lot of discussion through the years about, well, if there are less stem cells are the quality of the stem cells that remain equal to the quality of the stem cells when I was eight years old. And I don’t know that the answer to that has been definitively processed. Your cells have a relatively finite lifespan, and that’s because every time a cell divides, it needs to make a full copy full and accurate copy of your DNA inside of every cell are chromosomes. And those chromosomes need to be replicated fully in order for the daughter cell to be just like the mother cell. There are little regions on the ends of chromosomes that are called telomeres, and the more a cell divides, the more trouble it has maintaining the fidelity of the DNA at the ends of these chromosomes and in these telomeres. And so there’s been a lot of research, there’s thousands of papers that are out there on the ability of cells to make telomeres successfully and with high fidelity as we age. And there are many people that believe one of the reasons that we age is in fact because these cells lose the ability to accurately make copies of the DNA for those daughter cells, why one source of mesenchymal stem cell might be better than another.
Why, for example, do people use umbilical cord stem cells for some things where they use adipose derived MSC for other things? I don’t know that the jury is in on this exactly. There’s a couple of things to think about. First of all, harvesting bone marrow, itself, is not an innocuous process. Harvesting bone marrow from an adult, whether they’re 18 or 60, is a fairly painful process that the person will need to recover from. I will tell you, it’s sort of the same thing for adipose tissue. Obviously some people have a little more ability to give adipose tissue than others. So that obviously is an issue that we need to think about. And so then it comes to the umbilical cord. So there’s a lot of things about the umbilical cord that make it in a very attractive source. It is a tissue, it would be considered to be medical waste once that placenta and umbilical cord has done its job and you know, produced a full term baby. That baby’s born, that material is no longer needed. And 99% of the time that material is treated as medical waste and it’s processed that way. Actually, the umbilical court itself is a very rich source of MSCs. And so one can, with consent of the mother, get that cord and process the MSCs by a very simple process of opening the outer skin of that, of that umbilical cord, taking out the Wharton Jelly, and processing that. Now those cells, one might argue, are almost brand new cells. They’re in the process of being produced rejuvenated for a period of somewhere around, you know, seven months while that structure is in place supporting that fetus. They’re really very young cells that should have great regenerative potential for themselves.
Now all cells have somewhat of a limited renewal capacity. And so it isn’t that we could take one stem cell, for example, and expand that cell for the next 50 years and just have an unlimited supply. It doesn’t work that way in part because of this discussion that we had about telomeres and how the fidelity of DNA replication needs to be maintained. When you think about the size of the human genome, any change in any of the bases can become a problem. And so, maintaining fidelity is of utmost importance. It’s not that that umbilical cord is necessarily all that much better or worse, it’s just that it has maybe a longer ability to replicate itself. The cells, those mesenchymal stem cells, have a greater replicative capacity than stem cells from the bone marrow or from adipose tissue.
I think one of the things that we probably should talk about, when we talk about stem cells, this is really a field that has sort of blossomed in the last 15 or 20 years. It certainly, when I was a graduate student at Dartmouth back in the early nineties, I hadn’t heard of this. Cells produce little packets of themselves. If they’re not cells, they’re not trying to replicate themselves. They produce like a little membrane enclosed sphere, and that’s called an exosome. Those exosomes are very reflective of what that parent cell looks like. And so, for example, using exosomes that are derived from MSCs are really great because those exosomes, they also don’t carry any class two MHC, no MHC on the surface of those exosomes. If I isolate exosomes from MSCs, I can give those to anybody, right? Whereas if I isolate exosomes from a cell that I derive from the liver, those exosomes could in fact have MHC on them and be recognized as foreign.
When people think about all of the advances in the last, I don’t know, since 1990 when I, when I graduated, the ability of scientists to identify these new communication tools – so those exosomes are produced by lots and lots of cells in the body, and they go around and the cargo that they have in them can be picked up by other cells. And it may be part of this signaling process that we talked about where, you know, those molecules are signaling other cells to do something or not do something. It could be they contain messenger RNA that lets a cell do something that it’s not normally programmed to do. When I think about the stem cell field, for example, it’s all of these advances, but it isn’t just that we have stem cells. I mean, I knew we had stem cells back when I was in college. The question is really, what can those stem cells do and what can they be used for? And now, there are stem cell therapies for many, many, many diseases where you’re giving stem cells and you’re asking those stem cells to actually take on the persona of those damaged cells and help them to either recover or to actually replace them. That is a concept I think that’s new to me since I’ve been, you know, out in the working world.
I am Dr. Baker. I’m a board certified neurosurgeon. I’ve trained in prominent institutions like Cleveland Clinic, Louisville, and Johns Hopkins University.
I often get asked about safety of stem cell therapy. Now, you’ve got to realize stem cell therapy can be administered in a variety of ways. You can give it directly in the joint, you can inject it right on top of the skin or at an area that has degeneration, or you can give it in the spinal fluid called intrathecal administration. Of all, I think the intravascular supply of stem cells is where there could be dramatic promise for a variety of diseases.
The recent systematic review and meta-analysis published in The Lancet in 2020 provides strong evidence that intravascular administration of mesenchymal stromal stem cells, MSC, continue to be a safe treatment option. The analysis pooled data from numerous clinical trials and found no significant increased adverse event or serious side effect associated with mesenchymal stem cell therapy. This reinforces the safety profile of MSCs when delivered through blood vessels, suggesting that they can be used confidently in clinical settings for a range of conditions, including inflammatory and degenerative diseases. Overall, the study supports the ongoing development and application of MSC based therapies, highlighting their safety as a key factor in future research and treatment protocol.
I am Dr. Baker. I’m a board certified neurosurgeon. I’ve trained in prominent institutions like Cleveland Clinic, Louisville, and Johns Hopkins University.
Today I want to explore an innovative and hopeful approach in the fight against Alzheimer’s disease: stem cell therapy. As many of you know, Alzheimer’s disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disease characterized by memory loss, cognitive decline, and eventual loss of independence. Existing treatments, primarily target symptoms and do little to halt or reverse the disease progression. Stem cell therapy offers a groundbreaking possibility: replacing lost neurons reducing neuroinflammation, promoting brain repair. Stem cells can secrete neurotrophic factors that modulate immune responses and potentially regenerate neural network compromised by Alzheimer’s disease pathology.
A recent and highly notable study published in Nature Medicine in 2022 by Lynn examined the safety and therapeutic potential of human umbilical cord derived mesenchymal stem cells in these patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s. This randomized, placebo controlled trial involving 64 patients received intrathecal injections of this treatment Over 12 months, follow up treated groups showed significant improvement in cognitive assessment, including mini-mental status examination and Alzheimer’s disease assessment scale, and cognitive subscale, compared to control. Neuroimaging also revealed increased hippocampal volume and decreased amyloid beta accumulation, suggesting neural regeneration and reduced disease pathology.
This groundbreaking study demonstrates that stem cell therapy is not only safe, but also may modify disease progression in Alzheimer’s, offering hope for a disease that has long been considered incurable.
I am Dr. Baker. I’m a board certified neurosurgeon. I’ve trained in prominent institutions like Cleveland Clinic, Louisville, and Johns Hopkins University.
Today I wanna shed light on a promising frontier in the treatment of a LS Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a devastating neurodegenerative disease characterized by progressive loss of motor neuron leading to muscle weakness, paralysis, and ultimately respiratory failure that results in death. Currently, there is no cure and existing treatments only modestly slow disease progression.
STEM cell therapy offers hope by aiming to replace or support the remaining motor neurons modulate neuroinflammation, and also create neuroprotective environment. Various types of stem cells, including mesenchymal stem cells and neural stem cells, have been investigated for their potential to slow or halt disease progression. A notable and influential study, published in Nature Medicine in 2019, evaluated the safety and potential efficacy of mesenchymal stem cell transplantation in a LS patients. In this study, 18 patients received intrathecal injections of autologous mesenchymal stem cell over a 12 month follow-up. The treatment was well tolerated with no serious adverse events. Importantly, some patients experienced stabilization or slight improvement of motor function, and neuro-imaging suggested neuroprotective effects including increased motor cortex activity.
I am Dr. Baker. I’m a board certified neurosurgeon. I’ve trained in prominent institutions like Cleveland Clinic, Louisville, and Johns Hopkins University.
Multiple sclerosis is one of various types of autoimmune diseases. Your white blood cells, a specific type of white blood cell called T-cells, attack your layering of the nerves called myelin. In damaging this myelin layer, it can cause a variety of problems, including sometimes blindness, blurry vision, weakness, numbness, tingling, difficulty in controlling your bowel or bladder amongst other things. Current Multiple Sclerosis treatment primarily includes disease modifying therapies like interferons and other anti-inflammatory agents, including monoclonal antibodies. These aim to reduce relapses and slow progression. Additionally, steroids are used for acute attacks and symptomatic treatments to address issues like spasticity and fatigue.
Ongoing research is exploring stem cell therapies as well. Stem cell therapy offers promising hope for multiple sclerosis patients by aiming to reset the immune system and promote nerve repair. Hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, for example, involves rebooting the immune system to reduce the attacks at the nervous system. A notable recent study, published in JAMA Neurology in 2023, demonstrated that patients with aggressive MS who underwent hematopoietic stem cell transplantation showed significant disability improvement and reduced relapse rate compared to standard therapies.
While still experimental, these advances suggest stem cell therapy could become a vital part of MS treatment, potentially halting disease progression and fostering recovery.
I am Dr. Baker. I’m a board certified neurosurgeon. I’ve trained in prominent institutions like Cleveland Clinic, Louisville, and Johns Hopkins University.
Today I’ll discuss an exciting advancement in treatment of Parkinson’s disease stem cell therapy. Parkinson’s disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder, characterized primarily by loss of dopaminergic, neuron, and substantia nigra, leading to symptoms like tremors, rigidity, bradykinesia, and postural instability.
Current treatments include levodopa deep brain stimulation surgery, providing symptomatic relief, but do not halt disease progression or restore loss neurons.
Now, stem cell therapy offers regenerative approach by aiming to replace the degenerative dopaminergic neuron stem cells can differentiate into dopamine producing neurons, integrate into existing neural circuits, and secrete neurotrophic factors that support the neuronal survival. This approach holds the potential not only to alleviate symptoms, but also to modify disease progression.
A recent and highly influential study published by Takahashi demonstrated the safety and potential efficacy of transplanted induced PL potential stem cell derived from dopaminergic neuron in patients with Parkinson’s disease. At this pioneering clinical trial, patients received transplantation of autologous cells into the striatum. Over a follow-up period of 12 months, participants exhibited significant improvement in motor function with some showing reduced medication requirement. Importantly, no serious adverse effects or tumor formation were observed underscoring the safety of this approach.
This groundbreaking research marks a significant step toward realizing the potential of stem cell therapy to restore lost neurons and improve quality of life in Parkinson’s patients.
I am Dr. Baker. I’m a board certified neurosurgeon. I’ve trained in prominent institutions like Cleveland Clinic, Louisville, and Johns Hopkins University.
Today I’ll discuss an innovative and promising approach to treating spinal cord injury with stem cell therapy. Spinal cord injury often results in irreversible loss of motor sensory autonomic function, profoundly impacting quality of life. Current treatment largely focus on stabilization and rehab, but they rarely restore lost neural functions.
Stem cells offer a unique opportunity to repair and regenerate damaged neural tissue. Their ability to differentiate into neurons and glial cells, along with their capacity to secrete neurotrophic factors make them ideal candidate for promoting neural regeneration and remyelination and reducing scar formation. A landmark study published in the Lancet in 2017 evaluated the safety and preliminary efficacy of autologous mesenchymal stem cell transplantation in patients with chronic spinal cord injury. In this phase, the patients received intrathecal injections of their own mesenchymal stem cell. Over 12 months, participants showed notable improvements in motor and sensory function with minimal adverse effect.
The study also reported increased neural connectivity on imaging studies suggesting regenerative processes were underway. This research provides compelling evidence that stem cell therapy can be safe and potentially effective in treatment modality for spinal cord injury, offering hope for functional recovery beyond what is achievable with current standard of care.
I am Dr. Baker. I’m a board certified neurosurgeon. I’ve trained in prominent institutions like Cleveland Clinic, Louisville, and Johns Hopkins University.
Today I wanna highlight an exciting frontier in neuro rehabilitation. The use of stem cell therapy to treat traumatic brain injury
or T-B-I-T-B-I remains significant health challenge worldwide, often resulting in long-term cognitive motor sensory deficit. Traditional treatments focus on managing symptoms
and preventing secondary injury, but they often fall short of promoting the true neural regeneration Stem cells possess the remarkable ability to differentiate into variety
of cell types, including neuron glial cells, and to secrete neurotrophic factors that support repair and regeneration. This makes them a promising candidate
for repairing the damaged brain caused by traumatic brain injury. A pivotal study published stem cells translational medicine in 2019 by Wong investigated the safety
and efficacy of autologous mesenchymal stem cell transplantation in patients with chronic traumatic brain injury. The study involved 30 patients
who received intravenous infusion of MSC were monitored over 12 months. The result demonstrated significant improvement in cognitive function, motor skills,
and quality of life scores with minimal adverse effects. Importantly, the neuroimaging showed evidence of neural regeneration and reduced inflammation.
This study underscores the therapeutic potential of stem cells, not only to improve functional outcome, but also to promote neural repair process
that were previously thought to be unachievable in the adult brain.
I am Dr. Baker. I’m a board certified neurosurgeon. I’ve trained in prominent institutions like Cleveland Clinic, Louisville, and Johns Hopkins University. Today we’ll be talking about Alzheimer’s disease. It is the most common disease that affects memory and cognition as we get older.
What is Alzheimer’s? Alzheimer’s is a disease, a type of dementia that preferentially affects short-term memory in people who get older. A vast majority of cases of Alzheimer’s disease are non-hereditary. That means there are things that you can do that could potentially reverse or decrease the chance of you developing Alzheimer’s. However, there is a smaller segment of the patient population where there is a strong affiliation with hereditary components, specifically genetic mutations in proteins called Presenilin 1, Presenilin 2, or amyloid related proteins can give you earlier manifestation of Alzheimer’s.
In Alzheimer’s, essentially what’s happening is when normal cellular activity in the body occurs, the cells create byproducts that need to be eliminated. And in brain cells, these byproducts can manifest as plaque or amyloid protein gets deposited inside the brain cells. And instead of cleaning the cells out these byproducts, these cellular byproducts start getting deposited inside the brain cells and thereby killing these brain cells. It is not uncommon for a patient who has Alzheimer’s, who have significantly shrunken brain volume compared to same person, same age, and a comparative MRI. And there are specific parts of the brain that is specifically targeted more so than others, like the temporal lobe where the memory and language functions lie. Now, there are things that people can do that could potentially decrease the chance of developing Alzheimer’s.
Now, Alzheimer’s is also called type three Diabetes because patients who have uncontrolled high blood pressure, hypertension, who have elevated different types of cholesterol, who have diabetes, have a higher incidence of manifesting Alzheimer’s dementia compared to a person who has controlled blood pressure, who has normal blood sugar, and whose cholesterol is normal, certainly. Exercise has a positive role to play in preventing Alzheimer’s.
So how do you treat Alzheimer’s? Well, there are many drugs in the market right now that are supposed to help with Alzheimer’s, but there are no drugs in the market that are supposed to reverse Alzheimer’s.
A major reason why some of these drugs are not effective is because of an entity called blood brain barrier. Now, if you have an infection in your bloodstream, it can go anywhere, but typically does not go to the brain. And the main reason for that is blood brain barrier protects the brain preferentially from any of these pathogens. By the same token, if you have a drug that is going into your bloodstream, it’s not getting into the brain in high enough concentration to do its job.
So what else is there for a person to do in preventing Alzheimer’s, especially if you feel like you have risk factors for Alzheimer’s, you have family history that puts you at higher risk for Alzheimer’s? Well, in addition to controlling your blood pressure, your cholesterol, and not having elevated sugar and exercising in diet, there is evidence that supports use of stem cell as a modality to prevent onset of Alzheimer’s. And in some patients who’ve had Alzheimer’s as a diagnosis, after they’ve received stem cell therapy, they’ve actually seen reversal of function.
Stem cell therapy can be a very potent anti-inflammatory function that has a significant role to play in neural regeneration. Brain cells and spinal cord cells are not known for neuro regeneration, but this is a new era we’re in where we are seeing evidence of neural regeneration with the use of stem cells. If you have any peripheral nerve, typical growth for peripheral nerve outside the central nervous system outside the brain and spinal cord, that growth is one millimeter a day. That is not true for brain and spinal cord. So specifically for brain and spinal cord, stem cells can be a promising modality of treatment for patients who are otherwise hopeless with this problem.
At this time, stem cell therapy is not approved for Alzheimer’s disease treatment. We’re hoping that this would soon change and it would be FDA approved and available for all the patients who could benefit from the positive effects of stem cell therapy.
I am Dr. Baker. I’m a board certified neurosurgeon. I’ve trained in prominent institutions like Cleveland Clinic, Louisville, and Johns Hopkins University. Today I’ll be talking about spinal cord injury.
What is spinal cord? Spinal cord technically is an area that starts at the base of the skull, right where the first vertebra C one is, it goes all the way down to L two. In most patients, there is some variability, but for the most part, this is where the spinal cord lies.
Spinal cord tissue is like brain tissue. Once it gets injured, it is really hard for the injured part to come back to normal function. There are some bypass mechanisms, but for the most part, the changes can be irreversible.
So when a person has spinal cord injury, what does that mean? If a person has spinal cord injury, it could be one of many things as manifestation. One, you can have simple numbness. You’re trying to feel a certain part of your body and you can’t feel it. Another one is weakness. You’re trying to move a muscle with full strength and it only gives you partial strength and in some cases you have zero strength. That’s what you hear about people saying quadriplegia, which simply means all four limbs are not moving. Also, something called quadriparesis, which means you have movement, but significantly weak movement. Patients can also have preferential damage to the upper extremity, the hands versus the leg. A syndrome called central cord syndrome.
When you injure the neck, a certain part of the spinal cord gets damaged more so than another. The central part of the spinal cord, when it gets damaged, it preferentially affects the hand and the upper extremity versus the lower extremity. You can have a person who abruptly loses control of their bowel and bladder. That’s not good.
So what are some of the causes for a spinal cord injury? One of the more common causes for a spinal cord injury is a motor vehicle accident. You’re involved in a car, on a motorcycle or an ATV, you have an abrupt movement of the neck, hyperextension, which is this movement without fracture. You can have damage to the bones of the spine. It could be in the neck, it could be in the thoracic spine, which is this part of the spine, or it could be in the upper aspect of your lumbar spine, which is your low back injury to the spinal cord. Again, could be due to fracture of the bony structures, which means the spinal bones that are protecting the spinal cord, which lies right in the center of the spine called spinal canal. So if you have a fracture in that site, it can cause injury to the adjacent structure, which is the spinal cord and the nerve roots, the structures that come on each side of the spine, supplying sensation and motor function on the sides of the spine. So you can have an injury to the spine that is a fracture with no spinal cord injury.
How does that happen? We can, it happens all the time. Some people are born with capacious space, capacious spinal canal, which means it takes a lot of damage of disc herniation or bony fracture for a person to even experience any damage to the spinal cord. Conversely, you have patients who are born with narrow spinal canal, a condition called congenital stenosis. It means they’re born with small space. That means even the slightest disc herniation, even the slightest neck bending or hyperextension or slightest fracture can cause devastating injury to the patient. So spinal cord injuries are classified in ASIA classification, with ASIA A being complete loss of function, and ASIA D means mild injury to the spinal cord. And the specifics of these different classifications can be variable on how the patient manifests. You can have a patient who has a spinal cord injury at one level, but has motor function deficit at another level, because no two injuries are the same. You can also have a patient who has complete transection of the spinal cord, which the spinal cord itself is completely cut and disconnected from the other part of the spinal cord proximally. So these are all the different types of spinal cord injury manifestations that you can imagine.
Now, what can be done for a patient who suffered a spinal cord injury? Well, first things first. You know, when a patient comes in with spinal cord injury, oftentimes we see them having low blood pressure. The very mechanism that is intrinsically present to keep our blood pressure normal is compromised due to spinal cord injury that involves the neck. This is not seen in patients who have spinal cord injury in the thoracic spine, so we have to make sure that their airway is protected because patients who have high level of cervical spinal cord injury, their breathing can be impaired. The muscle diaphragm is supplied by the upper nerves of the cervical spine. So if that is affected, you have to make sure that the patient has the right tools to continue life, which is oxygen and breathing. And it’s not uncommon for these patients who decline in their function and breathing and would need immediate intubation, which is mechanical ventilation for them to keep oxygenating their tissue. When a patient comes in with spinal cord injury, you have to make sure their airway is protected, their breathing and their circulation is monitored. Once you’ve assessed that, you also have to look for any big injury that could be life-threatening, like a big vessel injury, like a heart injury or aortic injury, vena cava injury. And if there is any bleeding that could potentially exsanguinate the patient or if there is any injury that could result in exsanguination, which would lead to death. So once the primary survey is done, patient is stabilized, then we assess what exactly has been injured.
It is not uncommon for a patient who has suffered a severe trauma to go through an ER where they undergo what’s called man scan, which simply means they get a CT of the head, the spine, the chest, abdomen, pelvis. We’re looking for big bad injuries. It is during this scan, most often we discover what has been injured in the spine that has caused the spinal cord injury. It is also not uncommon for patients who can have completely normal CAT scan. That means there is no evidence of fracture, but the patient has suffered spinal cord injury. There is an entity called spinal cord injury without radiographic abnormality, skew a. It’s oftentimes seen in younger patients than older. These patients, they undergo all the imaging studies and the imaging studies are negative for spinal cord injury, but their clinical manifestation is classic for spinal cord injury. Oftentimes this is reversible. The function comes back as you’re going through the sequence of the CT at the spine, and oftentimes you do find the cause of the spinal cord injury where there has been significant bony injury that has resulted in direct compression of the bone over the spinal cord. Or you could have bleeding adjacent to the spinal cord that is causing compression of the spinal cord, which can then lead to compromise of the spinal cord.
So in this setting, whether it is an unstable bony fracture, or disc herniation that is causing severe spinal cord compression, or bleeding that is causing severe spinal cord compression, surgery is indicated and the earlier you do the surgery, evidence shows the better the outcome. So in this setting, if you have bleeding, you do the surgery to take the bleeding off, take the pressure off. If there is disc herniation, you remove the disc and fuse that level. If there is bony fragments that are compressing the spinal cord, you remove all the bony fragments circumferentially around the spinal cord, and oftentimes results in stabilization of that particular level of the spine that has been injured because the next day or the day after the spinal cord will expand due to injury. And if the expansion occurs in a very tight space, that would completely compromise the spinal cord forever. We don’t want that. So for that reason, surgery in many of these instances is indicated fairly immediately. Once you do the surgery, the patient has suffered a spinal cord injury and the patient is stable. The the bony structures are stabilized and uh, their blood pressure is stabilized, they’re breathing on their own. Then the next step is send them to rehab. And there are dedicated spinal cord injury rehab facilities in the country with great results.
So in patients who undergo timely surgical intervention and are stabilized from their ventilation standpoint, circulation standpoint, and they undergo a appropriate rehab in a timely fashion, but their outcome is still not good, what option do they have? While there is good news, there is evidence that the use of stem cell therapy in these patients can yield promising results. Last year, a study done at Mayo Clinic, they used stem cell therapy as a modality of treatment in patients who have chronic spinal cord injury and are paraplegic. That result came out with 70% improvement of function in patients who were paralyzed. Now this is amazing news for patients who had no hope. They’ve done everything right and they’re at least one year plus out from their injury. Now they have improvement of function. Now, we don’t know everything about this, but we, what we do know is there is promising result with this type of technology and we’re excited to offer that here at TriCelX.
I am Dr. Baker. I’m a board certified neurosurgeon. I’ve trained in prominent institutions like Cleveland Clinic, Louisville, and Johns Hopkins University.
Between the different types of stem cells, which type is superior amongst the various sources? Mesenchymal stem cells derived from umbilical cord tissue are often considered superior for regenerative purposes due to their higher proliferative capacity, lower immunogenicity and enhanced immunomodulatory property compared to derived or adipose derived tissue. A notable study published in stem cells translational medicine in 2021 by Wong demonstrated that umbilical cord derived MES stem cells showed greater efficacy in neuroregeneration and immune regulation, and in preclinical models suggesting they may be the most promising source of therapy for MS and other neurodegenerative diseases.
I think it’s important to explain why I’m here. Obviously, I do nothing with aesthetics. I do nothing with plastic surgery. I do nothing with anything that you probably are focused on today. I have a single focus.
I went into Afghanistan in 2002. I went into Iraq in 2003. I left Iraq 10 days ago. For the last 20 years, 25 years, I’ve done nothing but work in combat violence. And the simple fact is I got a call from a friend who I went to school with and he said, you know, this company has got something that might have applications to the military. And I said, well, I’m more than willing to take a call to see if this is something that would be helpful. And the more I learned about this company, the more I realized that there’s something that we can do for our soldiers in combat.
Look, we fought for the last 20 years in wars that were completely different from what you may have seen in Band of Brothers. Our soldiers don’t die on the battlefield from bullet wounds anymore. They die from bullet wounds because they bled out. We’ve solved that problem of bleeding out. And now our soldiers, if they get within a hospital within one hour, we call it the golden hour, they’re going to survive. Survival is one thing. Living the rest of their life as human beings, uh, is a little more difficult because the signature wounds that we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan were from TBI, toxic, uh, excuse me, uh, traumatic brain injury. Uh, we saw it from wounds that are knocking off limbs. And we saw it from other types of wounds that in my mind, TriCelX and their capabilities with their precision, their smart weapons, these, these cells that can rapidly cure or at least repair some of the problems that our soldiers encounter on the battlefield. I said, this is a company I wanna work for.
Now, if you also take a look at what’s happening in Ukraine right now, God forbid we didn’t have any types of nuclear explosions, uh, in Iraq or Afghanistan, but I would tell you right now, Putin every day threatens to use tactical nuclear weapons. It’s not gonna end the world, but these are like large artillery shells, but they put out a lot of radiation. And TriCelX, again, has a capability to solve combat injuries associated with radiation poisoning.
So if you take a look at what my soldiers encounter, traumatic brain injury, whether it’s from a parachute and I did 101 parachute jumps and we called our helmets, our brain buckets, and I probably have a little bit of TBI as well. I guarantee if you ask my wife, she’ll tell you I do.
But solving the problem with TBI, solving the problem with radiation hazards, solving the issues of rapidly repairing wounds far faster than anything we’ve seen, and candidly, the burns and the reconstructive surgery that our soldiers so desperately need after combat when they’ve been wounded heavily.
Look, if TriCelX can have, can help with that, I’m for that. Look, the people that are considering investing, there’s one rule you can do well, but you can also do good. And I think this company is a company that’s going to do well, but I also think it’s been a company that’s gonna do good. And if they do good for my soldiers, I’m behind them a hundred percent. So, thank you very much.
The use of this information and the materials linked to this TriCelX Master Class is for educational purposes only and at the user’s own risk. The content on this Master Class is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Users should not disregard or delay in obtaining medical advice from any medical condition they have, and they should seek the assistance of their healthcare professionals for any such conditions.
This content is provided by TriCelX exclusively for educational purposes on the TricelX website and may not be reproduced, distributed, or used in any form without prior written permission.” This material may be protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
