Canadian doctors reversed severe MS using stem cells | The Compost Bin | Forums

Hopefully the fda pushes this treatment forward

Jennifer Molson was 21, juggling a day job and night school to pursue her dream of becoming a cop, when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. She woke up one morning with pins and needles in her hand, and within a week she couldn't move her left arm.

By 2001, five years later, she was living in the Ottawa Hospital under 24-hour care, getting around using a cane, walker, or wheelchair. When she was discharged on weekends, to spend time with her then-boyfriend Aaron, she had to rely on him for her every need. He'd cut her food into bite-size pieces, and bathe and dress her. When she lost control of her bladder or bowel, he'd help her go to the bathroom.

"I had no feeling from the chest down," Molson says. "I could touch something boiling on the stove and burn myself. I could touch fabric without knowing whether it's sandpaper." For patients like Molson, with a severe form of MS and no response to the available medications, there’s little hope.

Two years later, her life had taken an abrupt turn. "I walked down the aisle and danced at my wedding, something I had always dreamed of doing," she said of her marriage to Aaron in 2003.

Now, 15 years later, Molson is still skiing and kayaking on the weekends. She works as a research assistant at Ottawa Hospital.

What happened is something even esteemed medical specialists are venturing to call a "miracle": The particularly aggressive MS that was on track to disable Molson entirely — and potentially kill her — is now virtually eliminated from her body.

The game changer for Molson was an experimental chemotherapy and stem cell bone marrow transplant she got in 2002 as part of a study in Canada. Molson was one of a small cohort of 24 people with MS who received the high-risk therapy. Of the 24 patients, 70 percent saw the progression of their disease halted or reversed.

Their experience, documented in a paper published today in the Lancet, is the first to describe any MS treatment that fully stops the disease over the long term without MS medication.

"Everyone is hesitating to use the 'c word,' but these patients are cured," says Michael Rudnicki, director of the Regenerative Medicine Program and the Sprott Centre for Stem Cell Research at the Ottawa Health Research Institute, who was not involved with the research. "Jennifer Molson was in a wheelchair in a rehab center unable to work. And now she's skiing, she's working, she got married, got her driver's license. I think this is going to be the new standard of care for progressive MS."

more http://www.vox.com/2.....cell-chemo