Stem Cell Deliverance – My Re-entry into Life

An accident in 1996 resulted in my hip and femur being reconstructed with titanium parts. That same year I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Physical and environmental traumas are listed, along with genetics and even viruses, as possible causes of Parkinson’s. My symptoms have included diminished handwriting, tremors, slurred speech, walking and balance difficulties, freezing of gait, constipation, diminished swallowing, sleep disturbances, involuntary leg movements, internal “shakiness” and body tremors.

All of this adds up to a loss of living. Even though I was “alive”, my decline of LIFE was causing me to do extensive reading and seeking ways to regain more than just ADL’s (activities of daily living) – I wanted my life back! And then I found a stem cell solution…

My journey back to life began when I learned of BioMark International, later known as Advanced Stem Cell Therapy (ACT), a company offering stem cell infusions into various locations of the body, neck or head. Umbilical cord blood is used by them as the source for stem cells. However, access to their therapy was limited; the closest available clinic providing such treatment was in Tijuana, Mexico. Yet, once I made up my mind, the following is the sequence of events I experienced from May 27, 2005.

I arrived in San Diego on Thursday afternoon, checked into the hotel, then called the clinic in Tijuana , telling them I was there and available for them to pick me up. The doctor moved my appointment up to midday on Friday. The car arrived at approximately 11:00 AM and they drove me directly to the clinic. The facility was clean, well kept, and the staff was very professional.

I was ushered into a room where they hooked me up to an IV, from which they injected the stem cells, which were in an attached vial. I noticed a paper on the table with my name and four other names indicating that I had A+ blood, which was correct. It also said the vial was A-, so I ask about that but they did not appear to know what that difference meant. That was the only thing that I noticed that seemed out of the ordinary. None the less, they proceeded with the administration of the stem cells. I felt every thing was fine, so I was not concerned, and only mention it as the blood type notation was the only thing they did not seem informed about.

After the IV infusion, they cleaned out the vial with some solution and injected that into the left side of my neck. They ask me to wait in the lobby to see if I would have an allergic reaction to the stem cells. After approximately 30 min they were satisfied every thing was as desired and I left for San Diego.

Upon arrival back at San Diego, I took a trip to the harbor to see an aircraft carrier up close and on arriving at the hotel I decided to get something to eat. I had been having difficult times getting around after sitting down for an extended period of time, and I do not know if the following response was psychosomatic or a result of the treatment. Surprisingly, upon exiting the hotel van, I found myself walking like I have not walked in years. It was as if there was no hint of the Parkinson's Disease! That lasted for the rest of the day, approximately 8 to 9 hours.

I went to bed since I was leaving early the next day to return home. I had a very difficult time going to sleep and was up most of the night. The next day things were pretty much back to the way it was before going to the clinic, except I was aware that I was not slurring my words like I had been doing for several years.

The flight home was very tiring as I was on a standby ticket and got bumped three times. Upon returning home, I had the feeling of a slightly upset stomach that lasted for about the next week. It was not so bad as to cause me to not eat but it was there all the time. I could also sense that something was different with my body, not that I could define it - just different.

I continued with my pill regimen that I had been on for several years for all of the first week home. I did notice that the feeling of my body shaking all the time had diminished greatly. I found that my walking had taken a dramatic turn for the better (Before the treatment, my feet, at times, felt as if they were nailed to the floor and sometimes I was just stuck there and could not move myself forward.) My legs did feel as though they belonged to some one else and were involuntarily moving around. I went about my routine as before going to Tijuana and on the 6th of June I woke up feeling much better. I decided to take it upon myself to reduce the number of pills I was taking from four Stalevo to three per day. I waited to see what, if anything, would happen.

My speech had definitely improved (which is a very real and meaningful thing to me as I have been a public speaker for years prior to the Parkinson’s intrusion).

By the 7th of June my stomach had calmed down and I had a more pronounced feeling of well being. I was told not to expect any thing dramatic for up to three months but I was feeling great and hoped that it stayed that way or would get even better. I knew that it was possible my experience was psychosomatic but I did not care. Just to feel better was wonderful! It seems as if some of the frustration of dealing with the symptoms of Parkinson's had melted away…

On June 26th I had a pretty rough fall in my front yard injuring my left shoulder so severely I could not type for two weeks. It finally came around, not bothering me like it did. The fall seemed to be the cause of a fairly severe bout of constipation. The day I got over the constipation I had what I call an epiphany. I was walking around with out my cane like there was no hint of PD. I actually went off and left my cane at work while making a delivery of a customer’s car (I carry my cane most of the time just in case I need it.)

Subsequent to my recovery, the symptoms pretty much returned to the way they were prior to the fall. I was sleeping better, some nights getting up to 5 hours of sleep (but most nights less.) I continued working to reduce my medications…

By August 4, 2005 I was experiencing more mobility – I had the ability to do my own chores again, though some difficulties were still facing me when attempting to first get out of bed. I could say unequivocally my mental attitude was better and speech, along with handwriting, had improved. Before the therapy, going to my automotive repair shop, answering phones, making quotes, filling out bills, and general office work was things I could not do. I did pace myself so I would not “run out of gas” and start shuffling or having fog (freezing of gait). It seemed to me the Parkinson’s picks the weakest part of the body to attack; hence, my walking is affected due to the titanium parts and physical damage in my right leg.

I also had feelings that things were changing inside of me. I don’t know how to explain it but I felt different – something was going on! My earlier concerns about the differences in blood type made me wonder if that could be the reason for the feelings I was having… August 27th was due to be the three month anniversary of receiving the stem cells. I was eagerly awaiting the time to pass.

At this point my tremors in the right hand were gone, my writing and walking had improved, the body tremors had all but disappeared, my swallowing was much better, along with improvement in sleep maintenance. My prescription medicine was still the same.

A representative from ACT had contacted me to obtain a follow-up report, but I waited about three additional weeks until I was more certain of the events occurring.

By the end of October, 2005,I began to feel that my status has begun to fall off. I wasn’t feeling as good as before and my off time has lengthened out a bit. I just didn’t have the feelings I had before.

Having read extensively on the subject of the possibilities provided by stem cells, I do think the initial infusion was a great help. However, my body, being in the condition it is in, just did not have enough cells to go around. There was more work to be done than the limited quantity of stem cells could do. I do feel the best track to be on is stem cell therapy, along with the improved diet and exercise program I have put myself on.

Though in an experimental phase, with much for everyone to learn, I feel the results of the stem cell researcher’s efforts will eventually help thousands of people stricken with catastrophic diseases/conditions. I am very thankful for the efforts of the company developing and making accessible such a therapy. Also important to me is the learning experience to be gained by various patients with Parkinson’s being encouraged and enabled to share their experiences with each other and publicly.

I, like so many with Parkinson’s, had been slowly falling into a pit of despair – the stem cell infusion process definitely allowed me a “re-entry” into LIFE!

Tom R Anderson

The article below, retrieved from Dr. Lieberman's website in April of 2006, is a good starting point to obtain an overview of stem cells and how they are used.



By 2010, over 2 million Americans are projected to contract end-stage renal disease, at an aggregate cost of $1 trillion.
In 2001, nearly 80,000 people needed organ transplants, fewer than 24,000 got them, and 6,000 died waiting. Of those receiving organs, 40 percent die within the first three years after surgery.
One in five of our elders 65 years old or older will require temporary or permanent organ repair or replacement during their remaining years.

In 2002, the prevalence of diabetes in the United States exceeded 18 million people -- 6.3 percent of the population. That year, total heath care costs of diabetes surpassed $130 billion.
Cancer kills one out of four of us, more than 1,500 people a day. Even though we are living longer, many octogenarians are unable to appreciate their lengthy lives: nearly half of the people over age 85 have Alzheimer's disease. American lifestyles promote physical inactivity and overeating, causing morbid obesity, hypertension, and diabetes. Add to this list crippling conditions such as spinal injury, Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, AIDS, and a host of genetic and metabolic disorders.

Given an ever-widening chasm between treatment and morbidity, it is no wonder the stem cell has become a common denominator of hope. Behind the sobering facts, patients and their families ask, "Will there be a cure? And will it be in time
for us?"
Much of the promise of stem cells rests on a scheme for replacing parts worn out by age, injury, or infirmity. Unfortunately, the reality of stem cell biology is overshadowed by the hype. For example, the future is imagined to hold an inexhaustible source of stem cells with a perfect genetic match banked at a local hospital, available for your every medical whim. Need a new pancreas? Place your order, and three weeks later a new one lies ready and waiting in the surgical suite. Heart failure? No worries -- a few injections with multi-potent stem cells will grow new cardiac tissue. And thus may 21st century patients extend their lives -- through a kind of patchwork medicine, held together by a fabulous, potent cell. This future sounds incredibly exciting. But it will take time -- and vision -- to us get there.

The truth of the matter is, we've got a goodly distance to go before regenerative medicine -- a catchall term for stem cell therapy -- will help large numbers of patients. It is very possible that many diseases will have to wait for cures from other quarters of medicine. Before any medical treatment (including cell and tissue transplants) is made available through hospitals or clinics, it must first be tested in humans through tightly regulated phases of clinical trials.

The first phase determines safety and side effects in a few dozen subjects; the second phase tests efficacy in hundreds of patients; the third and subsequent phases try to prove statistical significance and confirm its effects in many hundreds or thousands of patients.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) evaluates the data, and if the results pass muster, the product is approved for sale and moves to the market. Developing a new therapy goes slowly and is terribly expensive -- discovering, testing, and manufacturing one new drug can take between 10 and 15 years and cost nearly a billion dollars.

If the treatment being studied is for a disease with a genetic cause, another wrinkle must be ironed out. The faulty gene has to be corrected before the cells are reintroduced or the transplant could succumb with time, as did the original cells. This presents an added set of challenges to stem cell transplants. Once a genetically engineered stem cell is placed into the body and grafts into an organ, it may be there for life. If the change is in one of the wide-ranging cells of the blood or nervous system, the proteins made by the new gene will be everywhere in the body. Care must be taken to limit the effects of the therapy only to the affected areas.

Customized treatments that can't rely on economies of scale are likely to be very expensive. For an adult stem cell regimen, the tissue in which the stem cells reside must be biopsied -- perhaps more than once -- surgeries that can put elderly patients at risk. For any cell therapy the methods for isolating, growing, and expanding the cultures must be perfected -- complications not yet perfected for adult stem cells. The procedures must produce millions upon millions of homogenous, long-lived cells that exhibit sameness. Like any transplant, the cells must be free of contamination with unwanted viral, bacterial, or chemical agents.

To avoid "homegrown" protocols and to ensure quality, companies and hospitals will need to standardize laboratory, manufacturing, and clinical practices. Health professionals will need training to provide proper informed consent and oversight of the procedures. Some researchers assert that for each patient, between 10 and 20 technicians will need to work full-time in specialized laboratories. The costs for such individualized treatments, they say, would be astronomical.

A different strategy may reduce the cost. Rather than developing a custom stem cell line for each person, nationwide banks of several thousand stem cell lines could be developed. The banks would use a test called HLA (histocompatibility antigens) typing to match donor and recipient genes, minimizing tissue rejection. The closer the HLA match (either from family members or from outside donors), the less the chance that rejection will be a problem. A similar list of donors already exists. Over 6.5 million individuals have already been HLA-typed for bone marrow registries.

Other experts contend that individual treatments are feasible, and that once competition heats up, market forces will conspire to bring down prices. If a stem cell therapy can cure, they argue, then all the downstream costs of caring for chronic illness go away. A high initial price for injecting stem cells would be more than offset by future medical savings.

However, even with the concerns of time and money, there is plenty of good news. Stem cells are already used in clinics with resounding success. Here are the newest medical uses, some still in the last phases of preclinical development and some being tested in humans.
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed how radiation could obliterate the rapidly dividing cells of the marrow. Most radiation victims close to ground zero died within 30 days of exposure. Follow-up research found the only way to save mice from a dose of lethal irradiation was to transplant bone marrow from a healthy donor mouse.

The results led others to wonder whether radiation and chemical agents could be used against a disease of rampant cell division, cancer. Their hunch was right, and by 1965 the first cure of childhood leukemia by a bone marrow transplant was announced. The researchers didn't know it at the time, but the marrow's rescue worker was the hematopoietic stem cell or HSC.

There are two basic kinds of bone marrow transplants. Extracting the patient's own healthy cells from the marrow, storing them, and putting them back later is called an autologous transplant. After the marrow is removed, doses of chemotherapy destroy both the cancerous cells and the bone marrow. The cells are then reintroduced to repopulate the marrow, thereby rescuing the patient. Autologous transplants are usually performed when the marrow is healthy and the cancer is elsewhere in the body.

In the case of leukemias and multiple myeloma, the marrow itself is diseased. The marrow must be cleansed of cancer cells before it can be reintroduced. The advantage of autologous transplants is that the cells come from the patient's own body, so there is no rejection. New methods can sort the different cells in the bone marrow from each other -- similar in principle to the coin-sorting machines found in supermarkets. Clinical studies using blood stem cell purification techniques have found that patients are significantly less likely to have the cancer return and as a consequence live longer lives.

An allogeneic transplant uses bone marrow from a different person to treat the cancer. The donor's marrow is removed with a needle, treated, and filtered. Chemotherapy is administered to the patient, and the donor's marrow transplanted. Even the best cell filtration systems can't prevent the donor's immune cells from being transplanted and then attacking the patient -- in essence, a reverse kind of rejection.

Stem cells are now used to treat patients who would otherwise have to rely on bone marrow transplants. Rather than drawing out bone marrow through a needle inserted multiple times into the hipbone, the procedure relies on the stem cells circulating in the donor's blood. The blood is collected over the course of several days and filtered through a machine that isolates the circulating stem cells. Like a regular bone marrow transplant, chemotherapy or radiation therapy is used to kill the patient's cancerous cells and "empty" the bone marrow. The donor stem cells are transplanted and, if all goes well, travel through the blood to the vacant marrow where they colonize, produce red cells, immune cells, and platelets.

Umbilical cord blood has emerged as a new source for transplanting blood stem cells to treat some malignant and nonmalignant blood diseases. Cord blood has only a few primitive blood stem cells because of the small volume of blood found inside -- a disadvantage when transplant success is tied to the number of cells infused. The small quantity means that such transplants are suitable only for children or small adults. Nevertheless, using cord blood has advantages.

Tests of umbilical cord blood show that its stem cells are highly potent and very active, which means they generate more new blood cells in the bone marrow than their hematopoietic stem cell cousins. Because the immune cells in cord blood are quite immature, an exact HLA match is less important than it is in an HSC transplant using stem cells from an older donor. The incoming white blood cells are less likely to attack the patient, resulting in a lower incidence of graft-versus-host-disease. This increases the number of acceptable donors.

To boost the numbers needed, mixed cord blood from several donors has been used with good success. As with other rare adult stem cells, the biggest barrier to using cord blood is their limited number and lack of methods to expand cultures to large enough quantities. Stem cell companies are working on methods to multiply cord blood stem cells so they can be used in adult patients.
Many parents donate their child's cord blood for public use. Like bone marrow registries, public banks need a wide variety of cord blood types in order to match donors with recipients. Parents with one sick child (or close relative who is sick) can bank the cord blood of a subsequent healthy child. Cord blood saved from healthy siblings has proven useful for helping children with genetic blood diseases such as sickle cell anemia. If the first child is affected with the disease, the cord blood from a healthy second child can be used as a transplant.

Comment from Dr Lieberman: Dr Dinesh Garg, a pioneer in umbilical cord stem cells, is doing research on the use of these cells in Parkinson disease. Dr Garg has performed 25 such transplant in India and plant to start a program in the United States. The cells will be implanted into the substantia nigra, the site of the major pathology in PD.

Stem cells are revolutionizing a high-tech medical field that unites engineering, materials science, and cell biology. The two-decade-old field of tissue engineering relies on the body's own repair mechanisms. A "scaffold" made of nylon or a biomaterial like collagen is transplanted into the body. Cells use the scaffold as support, replacing it over time with natural three-dimensional tissue. Scaffolds can be used with transplanted cells too. Like the cells in bone marrow transplants, the introduced cells are either from the patient or from a donor.

When it comes to understanding how nerve cells come to be, Anders Bjorklund, professor and chief of the Wallenberg Neuroscience Center at Lund University, Sweden, says that "compared to our understanding of the blood stem cell system, we are at least a couple of decades behind." Bjorklund, with support from the Michael J. Fox Foundation, pursues clinical research in Parkinson's disease, where loss of cells that produce dopamine causes neurons to fire out of control; this results in loss of motor movements.

There is a history of treating Parkinson's patients using neural cells from aborted fetal tissue. Bjorklund's ground breaking work in the late 1980s transplanted six-to eight-week-old neural fetal cells into the brains of humans and proved that cell therapy could actually work. In the majority of patients the injections improved motor function. Follow-up studies have been less encouraging. A clinical trial in 1999 at Columbia University and the University of Colorado had mixed results, helping younger patients but offering no benefit to patients over 60. In 2001, the same physicians did a follow-up study, but this time tremors in 6 out of 20 patients receiving fetal cells became worse. The results worried many who feared that cell therapy could be more damaging than therapeutic, especially when treating brain disease. As a result, preclinical work with stem cells is moving slowly through animal testing.

Slow-progressing brain diseases are heartbreaking, but there is an affliction that is even worse: Batten's disease. In Batten's patients, a defective enzyme keeps cells from degrading lipoproteins, fatty packages of cholesterol that travel through the bloodstream. Lipoproteins accumulate in the cell's cytoplasm to the point where they destroy neurons, retinal cells, and brain cells. The afflicted individuals go through rapid stages of blindness, ataxia, dementia, and finally, death. Batten's disease is fatal and affects only children. In the United States alone, 10,000 infants will appear healthy until their first birthday. By age three they will be dead.
Gene therapy is a relatively recent and highly experimental approach to treating disease. Although most drugs are manufactured outside the body, gene therapy takes a different approach: a gene is delivered into the affected cells in the body, where it produces a protein that acts as a therapeutic agent. The potential success depends not only on the gene's delivery into the appropriate cells, but also on the gene's ability to function properly. Both requirements pose considerable technical challenges. Noninfectious viruses are used to deliver the gene, just like ordinary viruses infect cells. Unfortunately, this method is imprecise and also limited to the specific types of cells the virus can infect. If the proteins aren't produced efficiently or the transformed cells eventually die of old age, then repeated rounds of therapy are needed.

Gene therapy can be improved by using stem cells. Because stem cells self-renew, they can reduce the need for repeated rounds of therapy. Blood-forming stem cells are especially good choices for delivering drugs because they are easily removed from -- and reintroduced into -- the body, and once in the body they home in on certain organs and structures such as marrow, spleen, and thymus. Dozens of human clinical trials have used HSCs to deliver therapeutic agents such as interferon to patients suffering from blood and solid-tumor cancers (as opposed to cancers of the blood), anemias, and immune diseases such as SCID and HIV. In some cases the results have been promising, extending the lives of terminally ill patients.

Cell-to-cell fusion -- one of the phenomena behind apparent stem cell plasticity -- might also be a way to deliver a therapeutic gene. If the disease is due to a missing or defective gene in the liver, an engineered blood stem cell might fuse with liver cells and produce the needed protein. However, fusion is a rare event, so delivering enough protein to repair the organ may be a problem.
Neuroscientist Anders Bjorklund believes that a combination of gene and stem cell therapy holds the key to correcting brain dysfunction. He's set his sights on a mutation in a gene implicated in Parkinson's called Nurr1.

If a corrected copy of Nurr1 can be delivered to patients via stem cells, he believes it will slow or stop Parkinson's progression. The idea is to swap a corrected copy of the defective gene into an uncommitted neural cell. Many such engineered cells could be injected directly into the brain. If the cells took hold, they would manufacture the missing protein. Bjorklund adds that cells that promote brain healing and self-repair could be injected. The big hurdle here is navigating the pathways of cell differentiation. According to Bjorkund, "One of our dilemmas is that we don't always know what is, and what is not, a nervous system stem cell."