TOKYO: A stem cell treat­ment helped improve the motor function of two out of four patients with a spinal cord injury in the first clinical study of its kind, Japanese scientists said.

There is currently no effective treatment for paralysis caused by serious spinal cord injuries, which affect more than 150,000 patients in Japan alone, with 5,000 new cases each year.

Researchers at Tokyo’s Keio University are conducting their study using induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) — created by stimulating mature, already specialised, cells back into a juvenile state.

They can then be promp­ted to mature into different kinds of cells, with the Keio researchers using iPS-derived cells of the neural stem. The university said on Friday that the motor function score for two patients improved after an operation to implant more than two million iPS-deriv­ed cells into a spinal cord.

No serious adverse event was observed for all four cases after a year of monitoring, the university said. The research’s main goal was to study the safety of injecting the cells.

Public broadcaster NHK reported that one of the two was an elderly man who suffered the injury in an accident.

Published in Dawn, March 23rd, 2025