An experimental stem cell treatment trial involving stroke victims has shown great promise after scientists witnessed signs of improvement in the patients.

However, the researchers from Glasgow’s Southern General Hospital in Scotland stressed that it is too early to say if the improvement is due to the therapy.

In the trial, which began in 2010, six patients had human stem cells inserted close to the damaged part of their brain and five of them have shown improvements in the limb weakness they suffered as a result of their stroke, the BBC reported.

The doctors hope that the treatment will repair their damaged brain tissue and restore some of their movement and ability to speak. The trail is at an early stage, and doctors are primarily looking to see that the treatment is safe.

Presenting their results at the International Society for Stem Cell Research in Japan, the researchers said that they had noticed that the speech of some of their patients was less slurred, hand movements improved in others and leg strength and stability had improved in another.

According to lead researcher Prof Keith Muir, the changes were “nothing very dramatic”, but they were surprising because it had been thought that patients who had been disabled for so long would show no improvement whatsoever.

The question that the doctors have to answer is whether the slight improvements are due to the cell therapy the patients are receiving, or whether it is simply due to the extra attention the men are receiving from hospital staff.

The team is halfway through its experimental trial and Prof Muir believes that his team will soon be able to resolve the issue. “We hope to tease out over the next 18 months whether the improvement is due to the treatment,” he said.

Critics, meanwhile, objected to the trial as brain cells from foetus were originally used to create the cell treatment.

Mr Michael Hunt, Chief Executive Officer of the company that produced the stem cells, Reneuron, said that the technology used to grow the cells is such that no further foetal tissue will be required.

“We originally derived this material nine years ago from foetal tissue,” said Mr Hunt. “But what we’ve been able to do with the technology is to grow cells from the original sample such that we don’t have to source any further tissue“.

If everything goes very well, a treatment could be widely available within five years, but now “it is a case of so far, so good”, he said.

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