Doctors using person’s own stem cells to treat TBI
A Texas surgeon (along with a team of doctors) is always looking for different ways to treat children and adults with traumatic brain injury. One of those treatments involves using the patient’s own stem cells. Dr. Kevin Lally is the surgeon in chief at Children’s Memorial Herman Hospital and chair of the department of pediatric […]
A Texas surgeon (along with a team of doctors) is always looking for different ways to treat children and adults with traumatic brain injury. One of those treatments involves using the patient’s own stem cells.
Dr. Kevin Lally is the surgeon in chief at Children’s Memorial Herman Hospital and chair of the department of pediatric surgery at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth. Lally is working to harness the power of the body’s own cells to heal itself.
“The team has found that using a patient’s own stem cells appears to dampen the body’s inflammatory response to trauma and preserve remaining brain tissue,” an article by the Houston Chronicle reports.
The Centers for Disease Control reports that 1.7 million people sustain a traumatic brain injury every year in, 275,000 are hospitalized with a brain injury, and 52,000 people die of a TBI annually in the U.S. Nearly a half million who end up in the emergency room with a brain injury are somewhere between newborns and age 14.
Lally recently sat down with The Houston Chronicle to talk about his team’s stem cell research and said that the team is able to use the patient’s own stem cells to repair their brains.
“When you have a brain injury, you have the immediate injury, but at the same time the body responds and may set up inflammations to joints or some other place. That’s dangerous,” Lally said during the interview. “When we use the stem cells, it shuts that inflammation off. It turns it off and allows the body to recover. We can’t fix the part that’s gone, but we can stop further injury and at the same time allow the brain to heal itself. Without the stem cells, you have this ongoing inflammation and injury in the brain.”
Lally said they’re hoping the treatment will impact TBI patients ’ quality of life and their life expectancy.
The group is currently in Phase 2 of trials for both children and adults with head injuries. The work is being funded by the National Institutes of Health for the children, and the adults are funded by the Department of Defense.
Lally told The Chronicle that results so far have been very promising.
