Stem cell-based therapy enters clinical trials
By Cui Ning (China Daily)
Updated: 2005-02-02 01:50

Chinese scientists have succeeded in moving stem cell-based therapies from laboratories to clinical trials in an effort to help leukaemia and other patients suffering from severe diseases.

An injection of primitive mesenchymal stem cells developed by Chinese scientists has gone into the first phase of clinical experimentation, Zhao Chunhua, a professor with Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, said at a news conference yesterday in Beijing.

Zhao said scientists are also working hard to apply stem cell-based therapies to pre-clinical trials for treating coronary disease, diabetes, liver failure and other severe cases, thus paving the way for commercializing stem cell medical products, Zhao said.

Pathological damage or malfunc-tion of tissue organs are a major threat to human health. Traditional clinical therapies, including medica-tions, organ transplants and other methods have proved far from effective to full recovery of such patients.

Stem cell-based therapy, focu-sing on repairing damaged or malfunctioning tissue organs, is expected to greatly upgrade the efficiency in treating such serious cases, according to Zhao.

The human body is something like a "cell world" consisting of 1,000,000 billion cells in more than 200 kinds of different tissues. Those cells derive from stem cells with high potential in reproductive fission.

Therefore, how to obtain fission-prone and pluripotent stem cells of multiple-tissues and how to develop techniques for making ex-body stem cells in order to treat malignant tumours and other severe diseases have become a hot topic in stem cell research, according to scientists.

Zhao's research team has isolated potent stem cells from bone marrow, that can be induced and then fuse into various tissue cells in a given body environment, so as to help patients repair and renew organisms.

Zhao said the first phase of clinical experiments will conclude in three months. "If everything goes well, we will summarize the experiment and march towards the second and third clinical trials, hopefully in a year," said Zhao.

Zhang Mu, an official with the Biological Technology Centre of the Ministry of Science and Technology, said: "Whether this breakthrough of stem cell-based therapies are successful or not, depends on clinical effects."

Ministries of health, and science and technology are stipulating regulations to ensure an effective use of stem cell-based therapies within an ethical code, said Jia Jingdun, an official of the Ministry of Science and Technology.

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