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A recent study has shown that injecting a type of stem cell into the brains of multiple sclerosis patients achieves promising results and may protect the brain from damage caused by the disease.

The study, published Monday by British and Italian researchers in the journal Stem Cell, represents a step towards developing an advanced stem cell treatment for multiple sclerosis, a disease that causes disability and some sufferers lose the ability to walk alone or to walk alone. walking in general.

More than two million people worldwide live with multiple sclerosis, and this disease occurs because the body’s immune system destroys “myelin,” which is the protective covering that surrounds nerve fibers around the brain and spinal cord , which leads to communication problems between nerve fibers in the brain and spinal cord. brain and the rest of the body.

Recent research developments have revealed that stem cell treatments can help alleviate this damage by injecting or transplanting “master” stem cells into the body, which can be programmed to develop into almost any cell type within the body.

After a previous successful study conducted in mice to test this approach, the researchers continued their new study in humans, where neural stem cells were injected directly into the brains of 15 multiple sclerosis patients in Italy.

The stem cells were extracted from cells taken from the brain tissue of one of the fetuses, and researchers followed the patients for 12 months, during which there were no treatment-related deaths or serious adverse effects.

At the start of the study, all patients showed high levels of disability and most required a wheelchair.

However, during the 12-month follow-up period, none of them showed an increase in disability or worsening of symptoms, and none of the patients reported symptoms indicating a relapse, and their cognitive functions did not worsen significantly during the study period, which The researchers considered that the disease was stable and there were no signs of progress.

The researchers evaluated a subset of patients for changes in brain tissue volume associated with disease progression and found that the higher the dose of stem cells injected, the less the decline in brain volume over time.

The lead researcher of the study from Britain’s University of Cambridge, Professor Stefano Pluchino, says: “This study is a first phase of human clinical trials to evaluate the feasibility, safety and tolerability of neural stem cell injections in patients with multiple sclerosis. “

He added to Asharq Al-Awsat that “the success achieved by the team at this stage is a prerequisite for developing efficacy studies, which will be the next step for the research group”, underlining that “the experiments will be conducted on a larger number of patients to better monitor the therapeutic effects of this approach.”