Stem Cells - great news for patients in the North

Exciting new back pain treatment a real possibility
September 2007

Researchers in Clinical and Laboratory Medicine are hopeful that they can transform the treatment of low back pain, having won a grant from the Arthritis Research Campaign.

Millions of people in the UK suffer from severe low back pain caused by the wearing away or degeneration of intervertebral discs. At the moment there is no effective treatment for the condition other than surgery to either replace the disc or fuse the spine, or painkillers.

Professor Judith Hoyland and her Tissue Injury and Repair research group plan to use stem cells taken from bone marrow to repair worn discs in the spine. They have been awarded funding of £164,406 over three years by the arc to find new ways of regenerating the worn discs by implanting conditioned stem cells to repair the damage.

And they predict that if the research goes according to plan, treatment to inject regenerated cells into worn discs could be carried out on patients with low back pain within five to ten years.

“Intervertebral disc degeneration is a common cause of back pain but there are no therapies aimed at its causes,” explained Professor Hoyland. “What we need is a therapy which would restore the disc, which would be preferable to removing the disc or replacing it with an artificial material.”

The team aim to reverse the process of degeneration by using adult stem cells from bone marrow to produce disc cells that can be injected into the disc which would then repair it.

“It is possible to take stem cells from bone marrow and develop them into the kind of cells that are produced in intervertebral discs, and we are now looking at the factors that are necessary for this to happen - such as growth factors, a low oxygen environment and mechanical load - all factors that cells would be exposed to inside an intervertebral disc in the body,” said Professor Hoyland.

Once the stem cells have been changed to disc cells in the laboratory, the team will then go a step further and inject the cells into a piece of disc tissue taken from a patient to investigate whether the correct disc tissue is formed when cells are exposed to conditions found in the human spine.

Other international research teams are involved in similar research, but Professor Hoyland stressed that the Manchester team’s expertise in the field put them in a very strong position. They were attracting interest from spinal surgeons and from the pharmaceutical industry about developing gels which would aid the cells being injected into the damaged disc.

“If we are successful I believe this technique could be clinically applicable within five to ten years,” she added.

A spokeswoman for the Arthritis Research Campaign said Professor Hoyland’s work was hugely exciting and held out real hope of an effective new treatment for the many sufferers of low back pain.