New hope was raised yesterday for people left paralyzed by injury, after doctors said they had succeeded in using stem cells to restore feeling in two patients.

In a world first, doctors at Zurich University said two out of three men who had agreed to take part in an early trial, had regained some sensation below the level of their injuries.

It is the first time anyone has reported a positive outcome from stem cell therapy for severe spinal cord injury - and holds out the possibility of greater things in years to come.

The ultimate aim is to help those paralysed by injury to walk again.

Stem cells are special cells that can turn themselves into almost any kind of cell in the body. Those from human embryos have that absolute ability, while 'adult' stem cells have already specialized to a degree. For instance, neural stem cells can special ise into different type of nerve cells, but not something else like muscle or blood cells.

The trial worked on the theory that injected adult stem cells would transform themselves into spinal cord nerves, reconnecting brain and lower body.

Professor Armin Curt, leading the study, described the result as fundamental.

He said: To find something that can repair the spinal cord is a huge breakthrough. If we can show that something has changed for the better [as a result of stem cell therapy] thats fundamental.

He presented the findings at the annual conference of the International Spinal Cord Society in London on Monday.

Prof Curt was working in partnership with StemCells Inc., a Californian company which also has a base in Cambridge.

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This Stem Cell Breakthrough Helped Two Paralyzed People Feel Again

Professor Armin Curt, leading the study, described the result as fundamental.

He said: To find something that can repair the spinal cord is a huge breakthrough. If we can show that something has changed for the better [as a result of stem cell therapy] thats fundamental.

He presented the findings at the annual conference of the International Spinal Cord Society in London on Monday.

Prof Curt was working in partnership with StemCells Inc., a Californian company which also has a base in Cambridge.

Dr Stephen Huhn, from the firm, said: We think these stem cells are one of the first tools we have for actually repairing the central nervous system.

"To see this kind of change in patients who truly have the worst-of-the-worst type of injury to the spinal cord is very exciting."

The three patients, who all had complete spinal injury where they could feel nothing below the break, were each given a dose of 20 million adult neural stem cells about six months ago.

This was primarily a safety trial, and Prof Curt said monitoring had shown a very good safety profile.

But detailed questioning and objective tests also showed signals were passing up the injured spine to the brain, when they had not before.

One of the patients, Knut lstad, a 46-year-old Norwegian financial consultant, said: Ive noticed changes. When somebody touches my stomach, I can feel something. I cant be specific, but I can sense it.

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Stem cells help paraplegics regain feeling

LOS ANGELES UCLA researchers have discovered a type of cell that is the "missing link" between bone marrow stem cells and all the cells of the human immune system, a finding that will lead to a greater understanding of how a healthy immune system is produced and how disease can lead to poor immune function.

The research was done using human bone marrow, which contains all the stem cells that produce blood during post-natal life.

"We felt it was especially important to do these studies using human bone marrow, as most research into the development of the immune system has used mouse bone marrow," said the study's senior author, Dr. Gay Crooks, co-director of UCLA's Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research and a co-director of the cancer and stem-cell biology program at UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. "The few studies with human tissue have mostly used umbilical cord blood, which does not reflect the immune system of post-natal life."

The research team was "intrigued to find this particular bone marrow cell, because it opens up a lot of new possibilities in terms of understanding how human immunity is produced from stem cells throughout life," said Crooks, a professor of pathology and pediatrics.

Understanding the process of normal blood formation in human adults is a crucial step in shedding light on what goes wrong during the process that results in leukemias, cancers of the blood.

The findings appeared Sept. 2 in the early online edition of the journal Nature Immunology.

Before this study, researchers had a fairly good idea of how to find and study the blood stem cells of the bone marrow. The stem cells live forever, reproduce themselves and give rise to all the cells of the blood. In the process, the stem cells divide and produce cells in intermediate stages of development called progenitors, which make various blood lineages, like red blood cells or platelets.

Crooks was most interested in the creation of the progenitors that form the entire immune system, which consists of many different cells called lymphocytes, each with a specialized function to fight infection.

"Like the stem cells, the progenitor cells are also very rare, so before we can study them, we needed to find the needle in the haystack," said Lisa Kohn, a member of the UCLA Medical Scientist Training Program and first author of the study.

Previous work had found a fairly mature type of lymphocyte progenitor with a limited ability to differentiate, but the new work describes a more primitive type of progenitor primed to produce the entire immune system, Kohn said.

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'Missing link' ties blood stem cells, immune system

The 1,300-pound patient trembled slightly as an 8-inch needle, carefully placed on the upper rump area, sucked about two ounces of fat tissue from his sleek body.

Its like grating cheese, said a winded Robert Brusie, the staff surgeon at Palm Beach Equine Clinic in Wellington who is performing the medical procedure on a 12-year-old show jumper horse. Racehorses have a lot less body fat, like Olympic swimmers or runners.

Liposuctionfor horses?

Sort of. But its more like regenerative medicine thats helping save careers and even lives.

For the past nine months, to help show horses with slow-healing ligament or tendon injuries, Palm Beach Equine Clinic has been extracting stem cells from fat tissue and injecting those cells back into the horses to repair the injured areas.

Stem cells are simple cells in the body that can develop into various kinds of cells, including blood, skin or intestinal tissues. Stem-cell therapy has had success in treating soft-tissue injuries and arthritis and other joint diseases in horses, degenerative diseases in dogs and such internal medicine problems as kidney disease in cats.

Horses, like the 12-year-old that underwent the 20-minute procedure Tuesday morning, are treated standing up and dont require general anesthesia.

Theyre big animals and getting up and down can be tough for them, said Richard Wheeler, a veterinarian at Palm Beach Equine Clinic. The procedure is not very invasive.

Wheeler said the clinic has performed the procedure on about 20 horses. Before the boom in stem-cell research, veterinarians collected stem cells from the horses bone marrow. It could take a horse a year or several years to recover from an injury, Wheeler said.

Now some are recovering in three months, he added. But since the procedure is still new, Wheeler remains cautiously optimistic.

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Wellington clinic uses stem cells to help heal horses