A patient has undergone pioneering stem-cell therapy to treat Parkinson’s disease, the Japanese drugmaker behind the treatment has said, in a world-first following its conditional approval in the country.<\/p>\n
Sumitomo Pharma’s treatment involves transplanting millions of induced Pluripotent Stem (iPS) cells, which have the potential to develop into any cell in the body, into a patient’s brain.<\/p>\n
Japanese regulators approved the groundbreaking therapy in March, following a successful clinical trial.
“The first transplant was performed at Kyoto University Hospital in October,” the company said in a press release, without giving further details.<\/p>\n
Parkinson’s disease is a chronic, degenerative neurological disorder that affects the body’s motor system, often causing shaking and other difficulties with movement.<\/p>\n
Worldwide, more than ten million people are estimated to have the illness, according to the Parkinson’s Foundation.<\/p>\n
Currently available therapies “improve symptoms without slowing or halting the disease progression”, it says.<\/p>\n
iPS cells are created by inducing mature, already specialised cells to return to a juvenile state.<\/p>\n
Under Sumitomo Pharma’s treatment, iPS cells from healthy donors are developed into the precursors of dopamine-producing brain cells, which are no longer present in people with Parkinson’s.<\/p>\n
During a clinical trial, seven patients aged between 50 and 69 each received implants of either five million or ten million cells on both sides of the brain.<\/p>\n
They were then monitored for two years, and no major adverse effects were found. Four patients showed improvements in symptoms.<\/p>\n
Sumitomo Pharma said that it plans to carry out transplants on 20 to 30 patients by March 2029. It is also carrying out a clinical trial in the United States.<\/p>\n
The treatment will gain full approval in Japan if its safety and efficacy are confirmed over the next seven years, according to local media.<\/p>\n
Today’s announcement comes a month after a hospital in Osaka carried out the world’s first surgery using sheets of heart muscle iPS cells that can help form new blood vessels and restore heart function.<\/p>\n
Japan also gave conditional approval to that therapy in March.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A patient has undergone pioneering stem-cell therapy to treat Parkinson’s disease, the Japanese drugmaker behind the treatment has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":669938,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[103,61,60],"class_list":["post-669937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-health","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669937","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=669937"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669937\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/669938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=669937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=669937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=669937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}