MIAMI - When Bruce Daily woke up after having lumbar surgery a year ago, he realized he couldn't move the right side of his body.

"It took me a long while to figure out I wasn't gonna walk again," he said. "I knew I was down."

Daily, 69, had gone in for lumbar surgery at the University of Miami hospital and had an ischemic stroke while under anesthesia. An ischemic stroke results from an obstruction in a blood vessel that blocks the blood from getting to the brain.

Because he was unconscious, he missed the four-to-five hour-window to apply the tissue plasminogen activator, or tPA, the only medication available to treat ischemic strokes. The medication dissolves the clot, restoring blood flow to the brain.

But while he missed that chance, he was right on time to meet Dr. Dileep Yavagal, a neurosurgeon who practices at the University of Miami and Jackson Memorial hospitals. Yavagal was enrolling patients in RECOVER-stroke, a clinical trial treating recent stroke patients with stem cells from their bone marrow and applying them directly into the carotid artery, one of two arteries that supply the neck and head with blood. Daily was one of 47 patients nationwide who qualified for the study.

The study is funded by Cytomedix, the company that developed the technology to extract stem cells from bone marrow. The firm chose Yavagal to lead a national blind study at the end of 2012.

Yavagal enrolled 13 patients at the University of Miami/Jackson Memorial Hospital, between the end of 2012 and January of 2014. So far, the initial three-month results have revealed that the marrow cells are not doing any damage, and there was no clear difference between those who received the cells and those who didn't. The study's one-year final results will be revealed in January.

"There is severe need for developing treatment for ischemic stroke, and stem cells are the most promising," said Yavagal, whose own research is still in its initial phase, focusing on using a healthy donor's bone marrow stem cells versus the patient's own marrow.

Stroke, the leading cause of adult disability in the United States, and the No. 4 cause of death in the country, causes 130,000 deaths a year in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Yavagal, associate professor of clinical neurology and neurosurgery and the director of interventional neurology at the University of Miami's Miller School of Medicine, said that restricted mobility or loss of speech resulting from a moderate to severe stroke can be devastating because patients often become dependent on someone else for daily activities.

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Can stem cells help mobility after stroke?

Sheryl Ubelacker, The Canadian Press Published Tuesday, August 26, 2014 6:45AM EDT Last Updated Wednesday, August 27, 2014 6:03AM EDT

TORONTO -- Canadian doctors have begun using stem cell transplants to treat "stiff person syndrome," a rare neurological condition in which a patient's leg and other muscles suddenly contract painfully, often leaving them immobilized like a tin soldier.

The disorder, which affects an estimated one in a million people, occurs when the immune system turns against a person's own tissues, in this case attacking cells in the brain and spinal cord.

Stem cell transplants have been used to treat patients with other auto-immune diseases, among them multiple sclerosis, scleroderma and Crohn's disease, but this may be the first time the procedure has been employed to alleviate the symptoms of stiff person syndrome, or SPS, the researchers reported Monday in the journal JAMA Neurology.

SPS is characterized by episodes of stiffness in the muscles and painful muscle spasms, which can be brought on by stress, loud noises or emotional distress. Some people with the disorder are so disabled they are unable to walk or move and may isolate themselves at home to avoid triggering an attack.

"Sometimes this happens when they're startled," said Dr. Harry Atkins of the Blood and Marrow Transplant Program at the Ottawa Hospital, who headed a team that transplanted stem cells into two women with the disease.

"So you can imagine walking across the street and someone honks the horn and you can't move, or you start falling and because your muscles can't move, you just fall and you hurt yourself," Atkins said Monday from Ottawa.

"It really does provide a barrier with just going on with your life."

Tina Ceroni of Toronto is one of the two SPS patients who had the stem-cell transplant -- and she said it has given back her life.

The personal fitness trainer, now 36, started getting severe symptoms in her late 20s. Initially she was diagnosed with hyponatremia, or low blood sodium, thought to be related to her heavy training schedule for a half-ironman competition.

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Canadian doctors use stem cells to treat 'stiff person syndrome'

Stem cells from placenta usually discarded after childbirth can now be used to develop treatments for conditions such as diabetes, with each placenta containing enough stem cells to potentially treat 100 patients.

Researchers from The University of Queenslands Centre for Clinical Research have discovered a way to extract large quantities of endothelial stem cells from the life-giving organ.

The placenta is the organ in which a foetus develops. It assists in supplying the foetus with nutrients during pregnancy.

The specialist cells, which form part of the interior surface of blood vessels, are abundant in the placenta but it has not previously been possible to isolate them in sufficient quantities for use in treatments.

Study leader Associate Professor Kiarash Khosrotehrani said researchers were now working to develop medical treatments from the endothelial stem cells.

One of the therapies we are exploring will benefit patients with any condition where blood supply to tissues is severely restricted, such as heart issues, Associate Professor Khosrotehrani said.

We have recently discovered that endothelial stem cells form new blood vessels when injected into the body.

A single placenta has enough stem cells for 100 doses, which means after giving life to a baby, the organ may then go on to give a new lease of life to many patients.

He said laboratory experiments had been promising.

We have conducted experiments in mice with restricted blood flow and this has revealed that injected endothelial stem cells spur blood vessel growth and improve blood flow by up to 30 to 40 per cent in just two weeks, Associate Professor Khosrotehrani said.

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Placental tissue gives gift of life a second time around

TOKYO: Researchers in Japan said on Wednesday (Aug 27) they have been unable to replicate experiments that were hailed earlier this year as a "game-changer" in the quest to grow transplant tissue, amid claims evidence was faked.

In a scandal that rocked Japan's scientific establishment, Riken - the research institute that sponsored the study - launched an independent experiment in April to verify research published by scientist Haruko Obokata and her colleagues earlier this year. But the failure to replicate the experiment casts further doubt on the existence of stem cell-like cells, what the researchers called Stimulus-Triggered Acquisition of Pluripotency (STAP) cells.

"Researchers have conducted 22 experiments thus far, but we could not confirm the emergence of cells in the conditions described in (Obokata's) papers," Riken said in an interim report issued on Wednesday.

Obokata since July has been trying in tandem with independent teams to reproduce her own results. The researchers will continue their experiments under more diverse conditions while also considering data obtained by Obokata herself, Shinichi Aizawa, a special adviser at Riken, told a lengthy press conference.

Obokata was feted after unveiling findings that appeared to show a straightforward way to re-programme adult cells to become stem cells - precursors that are capable of developing into any other cell in the human body. Identifying a readily manufacturable supply of stem cells could one day help meet a need for transplant tissues, or even whole organs, meaning that any advance in the field is met with excitement in the scientific community.

But suspicions began to emerge in the weeks and months after the research was published, building into one of the biggest controversies in scientific publishing for a decade. Leading science journal Nature withdrew the flawed stem-cell study after Obokata agreed in June to retract the papers.

Nature said it would tighten procedures to vet future studies submitted for publication. It said the decision was taken after mistakes were discovered in some data published in two papers, photograph captions were found to be misleading, and the work itself could not be repeated by other scientists.

Earlier this month Obokata's co-author, stemcell scientist Yoshiki Sasai, hanged himself, further shaking Japan's scientific establishment.

Researchers have been trying to replicate results appearing to show that exposing ordinary cells to various stresses had made them pluripotent, or able to develop into any type of tissue. Riken had planned to implant these cells into mouse embryos to test whether they really were pluripotent. But the experiments have been fraught with difficulty from the outset, with researchers unable to reproduce such cells.

On Wednesday Riken, also announced a shake-up of the Centre for Developmental Biology (CDB) where the scandal took place, adding it planned to cut about half of its 40 laboratories. CDB currently has around 400 researchers.

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Japan lab unable to replicate 'stem cell' findings