Hadassah trials for ALS now approved in the USA
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Significant success of trials that have already completely cured one person
Scientists at Hadassah hospital and their American associates are very close to finding a cure for ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, otherwise known as motor neurone disease), which has become well known across the planet recently thanks to the Ice Bucket Challenge.
ALS, also known as Lou Gehrigs’ disease in reference to the baseball player who received the first ever diagnosis in 1939, is a neurodegenerative disease that progresses rapidly. Some 5,600 people are diagnosed with ALS each year in the USA alone and its cause is unknown. There was no way of treating it, except with certain therapies that just delayed its progression and reduced patients’ pain, until today.
According to an announcement by Hadassah University Hospital, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently approved the beginning of phase 2 trials for the treatment in question, which employs the use of stem cells (not embryonic), at the Massachusetts Memorial Hospital and Mayo Clinic Minnessota in the US. The first phase of the trial showed very positive results.
The trials began at Hadassah in 2007 by Greek professor Demetrios Karousis, a senior Greek-born neurologist at Hadassah-University Medical Center, and are being carried out in cooperation with the company BrainStorm Cell Therapeutics. In July 2012, Rabbi Refoel Shmulevitz became the first known patient to ever be cured from ALS by using stem cell treatment. He was treated at Hadassah.
