“After over a decade of research, a wave of stem cell treatments are now showing promising results in trials, including for vision loss, Parkinson’s disease, and spinal cord injuries,” reports The Doomslayer.
Nature adds:
Japan is brimming with signs of an approaching medical revolution. Shiny white robots are tending dishes of cells, rows of incubators hum in new facilities, and a deluxe, plush-carpeted hospital is getting ready to welcome its first patients.
Building on the Nobel-prizewinning work of stem-cell scientist Shinya Yamanaka, researchers across the country are crafting cells into strips of retina, sheets of cardiac muscle or blobs of neurons, in the hope of treating blindness, mending hearts and reversing neurodegeneration. Results from early-stage clinical trials — some announced just in the past few weeks — suggest that the cells might actually be working to treat conditions as varied as Parkinson’s disease and spinal-cord injury.
Now, after nearly two decades of hard work and setbacks, many say that Japan is on the cusp of bringing these therapies to market….Now, medical facilities are preparing to welcome a rush of patients from Japan and abroad. “Regenerative medicine in Japan is moving very dramatically,” says Masayo Takahashi, an ophthalmologist at Kobe City Eye Hospital and president of the biotechnology company, Vision Care. In 2014, she became the first to treat someone with cells derived from iPS cells….
Unlike other regions, Japan has made the path to approval relatively easy…In 2013, Japan introduced a system through which regenerative-medicine products could be conditionally approved if they are shown to have no major safety issues and are likely to be efficacious. Companies can offer the treatments, with costs mostly covered by the national health system. But they must continue to collect data on safety and efficacy to earn full clinical approval.
