This campaign has now closed
Scientists are hopeful that they can transform the treatment of low back pain by using stem cells taken from bone marrow to repair worn discs in the spine.
Categories
Beneficiaries
Situation
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. Now a team led by Professor Judith Hoyland at the Tissue Injury and Repair Group of the University of Manchester have been awarded funding of £164,406 over three years by the Arthritis Research Campaign 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. 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. 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.