Open AccessProspects for bone marrow cell therapy in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis: how far are we from a clinical treatment?
Author(s) -
Fernanda Gubert,
Marcelo F Satiago
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
neural regeneration research/neural regeneration research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.93
H-Index - 38
eISSN - 1876-7958
pISSN - 1673-5374
DOI - 10.4103/1673-5374.189167
Subject(s) - amyotrophic lateral sclerosis , medicine , bone marrow , progressive muscular atrophy , cell therapy , mesenchymal stem cell , disease , stem cell therapy , stromal cell , atrophy , pathology , stem cell , bioinformatics , biology , genetics
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a fatal neurodegenerative disease that causes progressive muscular atrophy and death within 3-5 years after its onset. Despite the significant advances in knowledge of ALS pathology, no effective treatment is available. Therefore, it is imperative to search for new alternatives to treat ALS. Cell therapy, especially using bone-marrow cells, has showed to be very useful to protect the neural tissue in different brain disease or traumatic lesions. In ALS, most published results show beneficial effects of the use bone marrow cells, especially mesenchymal stromal cells. However, until now, the best outcome extends animal's lifespan by only a few weeks. It is essential to continue the search for a really effective therapy, testing different cells, routes and time-windows of administration. Studying the mechanisms that initiate and spread the degenerative process is also important to find out an effective therapy. Therefore, we discussed here some progresses that have been made using bone-marrow cell therapy as a therapeutic tool for ALS.