OUCH. Nature pulls no punches with OUCH. The ways they’re moving forward with stem cell therapies are pretty ingenious:
Several laboratories are investigating ways to treat neurological diseases by injecting cells into patients’ brains, and clinical trials are being conducted for Parkinson’s disease, stroke and other neurodegenerative diseases. These studies follow experiments showing dramatic improvements in rats and mice. But as work on potentially therapeutic cells has surged ahead, necessary surgical techniques have lagged behind, says Lim.
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Working with bioengineers and neurosurgeons, Lim designed a needle that bends. First, a straight, thin tube is injected into the brain and a flexible nylon catheter pushed through it. A deflector inside the tube arcs the catheter up and away from the entry track, and an even narrower plunger ejects cells from the catheter. In one injection, the device can deposit cells anywhere within a 2-centimetre radius along the track, a volume bigger than an entire mouse brain.
Several researchers hope to use Lim’s device for clinical trials in brain cancer and neurodegenerative disease. Xianmin Zeng, a stem-cell scientist at the Buck Institute in Novato, California, who worked with Lim to test the device on swine, says she hopes to file an application to use the device in clinical trials for Parkinson’s before the end of 2014.