Stem Cells Fix Damaged Leg Arteries

Stem Cells Fix Damaged Leg Arteries

 

Reported June 15, 2005

DURHAM, N.C. (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) — According to the American Heart Association, up to 12 million people have a condition called peripheral arterial disease. It causes severe pain and can even lead to gangrene and amputation. Now, a new treatment could help patients avoid that fate.

Winefred Cooley knows a thing or two about pain. “For a year or more, I had been getting up at night. It wakes me up, and I’d sit on the easy chair and just hold my foot,” she says. “It was just terrible, terrible pain.”

Peripheral arterial disease was wreaking havoc on her legs. She even developed gangrene in her toes. Jeffrey Lawson, M.D., Ph.D., says pain comes as a result of blocked arteries in the leg. “It’s almost if you can imagine traveling on a freeway. Here, where you’re on the highway traveling quite briskly, and the freeway hits a block,” he tells Ivanhoe.

Because her arteries were so damaged, Cooley was not a candidate for standard bypass therapy. “There’s no target vessel below an area of blockage that can be reconstructed,” explains Dr. Lawson, a vascular surgeon from Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C.

 

Faced with the possibility of amputation, Cooley chose an experimental stem cell treatment. Dr. Lawson says, “We designed a project to take adult stem cells isolated from a patients’ own bone marrow and inject them into the leg.”

Twelve weeks later, Cooley’s leg shows signs of regenerating blood vessels. She says: “And now I can sleep the night through. It is unreal. Well, it’s just more than I can ask for really.”

Two patients with PAD ve had the treatment at Duke University, and both have shown improvement. Dr. Lawson says, “They feel dramatically better, and both of them still have their feet where they were both candidates for amputation.”

Now, Cooley is back to her daily walks — and has very little pain. For now, the new stem cell therapy is experimental. Duke University Medical Center hopes to eventually conduct clinical trials and recruit patients from around the country.