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Osteoporosis causes thin, porous bones that are prone to fracture, but a promising cell therapy might offer a way to strengthen them.Credit: Dr Tony Brain\/SPL<\/p>\n
The ten older women had, between them, broken their bones dozens of times, often after little more than a stumble. But after receiving a single infusion of their own bone-marrow cells, treated in the laboratory to help the cells penetrate bone tissue, the women\u2019s fractures all but stopped.<\/p>\n
Before treatment, the women \u2014 the participants of small clinical trial reported1<\/a> today in Cell \u2014 experienced fractures in their spines, hips, arms and other bones every year or two, on average. After the trial, the women experienced bone breaks caused by low-impact trauma at a rate closer to once per decade.<\/p>\n The results raise the tantalizing possibility that a one-time cell therapy could rebuild brittle bones in people with osteoporosis<\/a>, an ageing-related condition that affects around 200 million women worldwide, particularly after menopause<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s quite remarkable,\u201d says Ajit Varki, a physician-scientist at the University of California, San Diego who was not involved in the study. The trial \u201cshowed an almost 100% efficacy sustained for several years \u2014 and no side effects\u201d.<\/p>\n Still, the findings come with hefty caveats. The study was small, had no control group and most of its participants were taking conventional osteoporosis drugs before and during the trial, making it difficult to tease out the effects of the cell therapy.<\/p>\n What\u2019s more, the researchers did not directly track the therapeutic cells in the recipients\u2019 bodies, leaving a crucial question unanswered: did enough of the cells reach the bones to make a difference?<\/p>\n Straight to the bone<\/p>\n Robert Sackstein, a regenerative-medicine specialist at the Miami Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Florida and a co-author on the study, is confident that they did. Sackstein has spent decades studying how various cells with regenerative potential \u2014 including bone-forming progenitor cells known as mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) \u2014 can be steered through the body for maximal therapeutic effect.<\/p>\n MSCs, when injected into the bloodstream, cannot usually reach bone tissue. But in 2008, Sackstein and his colleagues found that adding a sugar called fucose to these stem cell-like cells enabled them to seek out and enter bones, leading to skeletal tissue generation in mice2<\/a>.<\/p>\n Women\u2019s health research lacks funding \u2013 these charts show how<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n The added sugars usually disappear within about two days, and are thought to work by fostering interactions between the MSCs and blood-vessel walls. Those interactions slow the cells, allowing them to squeeze into the bone marrow.<\/p>\n After seeing the approach work in mice, Sackstein and his colleagues turned their attention to humans. According to the authors, few trials had tested MSCs for osteoporosis, and no trials in any disease had deliberately modified the cells to improve their trafficking ability. It took several years to fine-tune the manufacturing process3<\/a> and generate the required preclinical data before the trial could proceed.<\/p>\n But finally, in 2015, clinical collaborators in Spain led by bone-marrow transplant specialist Jos\u00e9 Moraleda at the University of Murcia, began the trial. They treated women aged 51 to 72, who had advanced osteoporosis and a history of fractures, with MSCs extracted from their own bone marrow and enhanced with fucose.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Osteoporosis causes thin, porous bones that are prone to fracture, but a promising cell therapy might offer a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":767915,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[5079,59,4230,5898,12368,4231,90,4396,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-767914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-ageing","tag-gb","tag-humanities-and-social-sciences","tag-medical-research","tag-metabolism","tag-multidisciplinary","tag-science","tag-stem-cells","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/767914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=767914"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/767914\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/767915"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=767914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=767914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=767914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/d41586-026-02828-3_50793318.jpg\"\/)
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