Subject: Adult Stem Cells Hold Hope for Autoimmune Patients
Source: Reuters; August 11, 2001

Adult Stem Cells Hold Hope for Autoimmune Patients

Chicago, IL -- Adult stem cells extracted from the blood of two Crohn's
patients have been used to rebuild their faulty immune systems, the latest
success with a technique that is being tested at several U.S. hospitals.

While the debate over the use and funding of embryonic stem cells
continues, doctors are already using adult stem cells to counteract
autoimmune diseases such as Crohn's, multiple sclerosis and lupus.

Doctors at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago said Thursday that a
22-year-old female Crohn's patient, whose white blood cells were attacking
her digestive system, was doing "phenomenally well" 2-1/2 months after the
undergoing the procedure.

Doctors were so pleased with her progress that they performed the
procedure on a second Crohn's patient, a 16-year-old boy, earlier this
week.

Crohn's disease, a chronic inflammatory disease that can affect any part
of the gastrointestinal tract, afflicts some 50,000 Americans and is most
common in adolescents and young adults.

For treating patients, using a person's own stem cells may be preferable
to using embryonic stem cells since there is no risk of the body rejecting
its own cells. The experimental technique has been used by doctors on
people with autoimmune diseases, in which the immune system inexplicably
attacks the body's own tissues.

Immunologist Richard Burt of Northwestern, who performed the procedure on
the Crohn's patients, said early results in both of them were very
encouraging.

"This is a patient who had bloody, watery diarrhea about 10 times a day
for nine years, with a lot of abdominal pain. Since the procedure, she has
had no diarrhea, is eating and is in no pain," Burt said of the first
patient.

"But we have to be very careful. This is experimental, one patient never
means anything. We can't say we've cured anybody. Only time will tell. But
this is obviously the best thing we could have wished for," he added.

Multiple sclerosis patients who underwent a similar procedure at another
hospital to rebuild their immune systems with their own stem cells showed
progress, Burt said. Though the therapy did not repair existing damage to
their nervous systems, it halted the development of new lesions, he said.

However, stem cell therapy on lupus patients elsewhere did repair the
damage to their organs, Burt said.

Robert Craig, a gastroenterologist at Northwestern working with Burt on
Crohn's disease, said it took him three years to find suitable patients
for this experimental therapy.

"They need to be very sick. They have to have failed on other therapies.
There aren't that many people who are ill enough to warrant this type of
therapy because the therapy itself is life threatening," he said.

The process is risky because it involves destroying the patient's
defective immune system with chemotherapy and a protein that drives down
the number of infection-fighting white blood cells. A growth factor is
introduced to stimulate the bone marrow to produce stem cells, which are
then harvested from the bloodstream. Finally, the stem cells are injected
into a central vein, either in the neck or arm.

The whole process, including recovery, takes three weeks.

"It scares me," Craig said. "I sweat bullets with these patients. When
their white blood count is that low they're very susceptible to
infection."

Burt, the chief of Northwestern Hospital's division of Immune Therapy and
Autoimmune Diseases, began studying the process of regenerating the immune
systems of animal test subjects more than a decade ago.

For instance, scientists have manipulated blood stem cells from adult mice
to grow into tissue and that bone marrow stem cells can be made to
regenerate heart muscle.

Whether the process will work on human beings is not known, he said.

"Can we use blood stem cells for tissue genesis to repair organs_ If we
can get a person's adult stem cells to do that from their blood then this
whole problem of embryonic stem cells in terms of the ethical problem is
not an issue," he said.

"If you're able to use your own stem cells, then this debate about
embryonic stem cells in not only moot, it's economically much better to
use your own because you don't have to have the extensive bank and ...
trying to see if you have a match, and all the quality control of
preserving the tissue. It's not just ethically moot, it's practically
moot."