Alzheimer’s disease affects nearly six million people in the United States and the CDC estimates that number will reach 14 million by the year 2060. The good news: researchers are hard at work to find options to keep this disease from getting worse. And they’re finding success.
A new drug called lecanemab is showing great promise for slowing the progression of Alzheimer’s disease by as much as 27%.
Additionally, a new treatment option just received approval from the FDA to begin trials: advanced stem cell therapy.
What Causes Alzheimer’s Disease?
A definite cause of Alzheimer’s disease has not yet been determined, but scientists believe that it likely has to do with the following:
Lifestyle. Poor diet, lack of physical activity, little to no social interaction, and not enough mental stimulation are all factors that may contribute to Alzheimer’s.
Genetics. Just because someone in your family has Alzheimer’s doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed to, but it does increase your chances of developing the disease.
Environment. Studies have shown that higher levels of education may correlate to a lower risk of dementia.
Changes in the brain that come with age. As we age, our brains shrink. They are also at higher risk for inflammation, free radical production, breakdown of cell energy production, vascular damage, and more. These brain changes are one risk factor for Alzheimer’s.
Is There a Cure for Alzheimer’s?
As of right now, there is no cure for Alzheimer’s disease. However, there are treatment options such as lecanemab and stem cell therapy that can slow the progression of the disease and allow people to live longer and healthier lives.
Why Stem Cell Therapy?
The blood-brain barrier makes it very difficult for drugs to enter the brain, and this is one of the reasons why many of the attempts to create a drug to slow Alzheimer’s have failed.
Enter: stem cell therapy. Stem cells are nicknamed the “body’s master cells.” They are the cells in the body that create all the other cells that have special functions (things like brain cells, blood cells, bone cells, heart muscle cells, and more).
Stem cell therapy bypasses this problem by delivering the stem cells directly into the ventricles of the brain, as has been shown in trials with rats. The way in which these stem cells were delivered allowed researchers to go beyond the barrier of the ventricle and permeate the normal brain tissue, thus allowing them to take these trials to humans.
How Can Stem Cell Therapy Help Alzheimer’s Specifically?
Stem cells, when introduced to the body, work to find the cells damaged by Alzheimer’s disease and replace them with healthy stem cells that can grow on their own and produce new brain cells that are healthy and free of disease.
This means that stem cell therapy may have the power to:
Improve memory
Slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease
Grow new healthy cells
How Does Stem Cell Therapy for Alzheimer’s Work?
Newport Beach, California-based research company Regeneration Biomedical conducted a trial where they gave 158 stem cell injections to 39 Alzheimer’s patients over the course of five years. The stem cells were injected into the brain ventricles through an implanted reservoir, similar to the process used for the injection of chemotherapy.
Integral to this study is the use of the patient’s own stem cells. Why is this important? Oftentimes stem cell therapy that uses another person’s stem cells causes the recipient’s body to reject the foreign cells. In addition to that, the use of the patient’s own stem cells helps to negate the risk of immune responses that can come with using donor stem cells.
The results from this trial showed improvement of cognitive function in the Alzheimer’s patients.
This trial led to Regeneration Biomedical’s production of a more potent pharmaceutical to increase the number of the patient’s stem cells in the lab by 20 times. They then took this pharmaceutical to trial in animals and it resulted in great success. Thus, the FDA granted clearance for a Phase 1 trial in humans that will begin before the end of 2022.
In these trials, researchers will inject the more robust stem cells into patients’ brains in order to see their effect on the progression of Alzheimer’s disease.
