New Treatment Promises Help for ALS Patients

YERUSHALAYIM (Hamodia Staff) —
Main entrance of Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, where ALS treatment trials will be conducted. (wik)
Main entrance of Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, where ALS treatment trials will be conducted. (wik)

A promising new treatment for patients with ALS (amytrophic lateral sclerosis) that was developed in Israel will soon undergo clinical trials, The Jerusalem Post reported on Tuesday.

The treatment, which employs stem cells taken from the patients themselves (autologous) gained approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Monday, paving the way for phase-II clinical trials. They are already scheduled to begin soon in Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and the University of Massachusetts Memorial Hospital in Worcester, and then at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.

Use of adult stem cells for the progressive, fatal disorder — also known also as Lou Gehrig’s disease — was pioneered by Prof. Dimitrios Karousis, a Greek-born neurologist at Hadassah-University Medical Center in Yerushalayim’s Ein Kerem.

The adult stem cells will be manufactured after extraction from ALS patients’ bone marrow at Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute’s Connell and O’Reilly cell manipulation core facility. The trial period will last a year.

Prelminary trials of the technique started at Hadassah in 2011. Researchers said that 10 of the 15 patients in the Hadassah trials responded or stabilized, and the disease was halted, with their breathing improved. About three of them even showed that the disease had receded, with them improving dramatically.

ALS is referred to as an “orphan disease” because it affects a relatively small number of patients — perhaps only tens of thousands in the world and 500 in Israel — and there is no other significant treatment.

The technique also holds promise for other diseases of neurological degeneration such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and stroke.

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