Clinical Trials Underway for Dozens of New Stem Cell Treatments

What will medical treatment look like in the years and decades to come? There’s a lot that remains unknown here; research can lead scientists in unexpected directions, as was the case with lizard venom and Ozempic. But if ongoing clinical trials are any indication, it’s a safe bet that doctors and medical professionals could be using stem cells to treat more conditions in the near future. Potentially a lot more.

In a recent article in Nature, Alison Abbott explored the wide array of conditions that scientists are currently looking to address with stem cell-based treatments. Abbott writes that these include “cancer, diabetes, epilepsy, heart failure and some eye diseases” — along with Parkinson’s disease. She goes on to argue that this represents a watershed moment for the technology, which has overcome some political opposition to gain a medical foothold.

One of the bigger takeaways from Nature‘s reporting is that conditions from epilepsy to Parkinson’s that affect the brain have been more responsive to stem cell-based treatment, owing to the human body’s immune system being less prone to reject foreign material in the brain. Finding stem cell treatments for heart disease, Abbott writes, has been more challenging.

Late last year, a clinical trial using stem cells to address multiple sclerosis also saw promising results. As Ian Sample reported at The Guardian, the scientists conducting the test found that patients’ brains were unharmed by the injection of neural stem cells. At the time, the University of Cambridge’s Stefano Pluchino called the results “very strong and very consistent.”

Stem Cell Treatment Worked on One Patient’s Type 1 Diabetes

The scientists plan to expand their testing soon

Even with some caveats, it’s encouraging news to hear that some debilitating conditions could be treated using this technology. That said, it’s also worth being aware of scams that claim to use stem cells to cure a host of diseases — something that’s been a source of frustration for regulators and law enforcement alike.