For spinal cord patients (SCI), umbilical cord mesenchymal stem cells (UCMSCs) are the standard treatment. Beike protocols generally recommend one injection by IV and five injections into the spinal cord fluid. Each injection contains over 10 million cord mesenchymal stem cells. The IV transplant helps repair damage outside of the spinal cord while the injections into the spinal cord fluid help to get the stem cells close to the injury site. The injections are given five to seven days apart – therefore a standard treatment generally takes 30 days.
For some cases, the stem cells are delivered by a CT-Guided Intraspinal Cord Injection, which is considered to be minimally invasive surgery. This special procedure can be requested when registering for treatment, but the final decision will be made by your physician in China, after the initial physical examination and review of your file and MRI. In other cases, where the physicians feel that surgery may help to increase cerebral spinal fluid flow, a surgical procedure may be recommended.
Procedure Options
While the standard treatment is six injections, many patients want to give the stem cell therapy its best chance of success since, in many cases, they have traveled a long way for the treatment, so some patients request up to eight injections (the maximum). In addition some patients also request stem cell injections derived from their own bone marrow (BMSCs), which contains a lot of mesenchymal stem cells, in addition to the cord mesenchymal stem cell injections. Usually patients who request BMSCs, will get two injections, each containing hundreds of millions of mesenchymal stem cells – cultured from one bone marrow extraction procedure. It usually takes about ten days to culture the bone marrow stem cells. There are other treatment providers in Russia and Germany that use BMSC therapy as their primary treatment protocol, but we believe BMSCs are best used as an adjunct treatment to be used in combination with our UCMSC therapy, in additionand our hospitals can provide more stem cells from your bone marrow for a much more competitive cost – compared to these others providers.
Stem Cell Benefits
Umbilical cord mesenchymal stem cell injections (UCMSC) consist of up to 95% mesenchymal cells. Since the cells are coming from the umbilical cord which is only nine months old at the time of cell extraction, some experts believe the cells are generally more active than mesenchymal stem cells taken from an adult’s bone marrow. UCMSC’s are immunologically naive cells, so your body does not recognize them as a threat, so they generally enjoy very low rates of rejection. UCMS cells produce cytokines - substances that help carry signals locally between cells. Some scientists believe that these cytokines may help communication between cells in the spinal cord and help restore function.
In addition, it is believed that UCMSCs provide the body with cell factors that can help to improve the local environment around the injury by encouraging the following functions:
- Improvements in immune regulation
- Reduction in cell death
- Stimulation of the differentiation of the patient’s own stem cells
- Neo-angiogenesis (the growth of blood vessels resulting in increased blood flow to damaged areas)
- Reduction in scarring
- Better conduction of inter-cellular electrical signals and transduction
