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(Stroke. 2009;40:S141.)
© 2009 American Heart Association, Inc.

Stem Cell Therapy

Introduction to Cellular Therapy

The Next Frontier for Stroke Therapeutics

From the University of Texas Medical School, Houston, Tex.

Correspondence to Sean I. Savitz, MD, 6431 Fannin Street, Houston, TX 77030. E-mail Sean.I.Savitz@uth.tmc.edu

Key Words: cell therapy • stroke care • stroke therapeutics

An extract of the first 250 words of the full text is provided, because this article has no abstract.

	Introduction

 
Cell therapy represents a new frontier in the development of therapeutics for stroke. Aside from physical rehabilitation, few options exist to enhance recovery from stroke. Prior studies in the 1990s provided precedence for considering a cellular approach to treat neurological disorders with the pioneering work on transplantation in Parkinson disease. These trials furnished preliminary evidence for a modest benefit in young patients with a neurodegenerative disorder who underwent neural transplantation. From those initial studies, pilot work emerged on the application of cellular replacement in Huntington disease and other neurological disorders. In an entirely different area of medicine, stem cell transplantation in oncology provided support for the idea that stem cells could be administered intravenously for a range of disorders including stroke. Over the past decade, investigators accordingly began showing that intravenously injected stem cells from the bone marrow and umbilical cord could promote recovery in animal stroke models. Thus began a new area of investigation in which adult stem cells from other sources, rather than the brain, could be tested for therapeutic applications in stroke.

As transplantation studies have been growing, it has also now clearly been established that the adult brain undergoes neurogenesis. Elegant work from Lindvall and Parent and others have shown that the periventricular regenerative zones of the brain upregulate neural stem cell proliferation in response to ischemic stroke. Newly generated progenitor cells migrate to the site of injury and differentiate, but most die before they are able to integrate and function as mature neurons. The brain, . . . [Full Text of this Article]