Stem Cell Therapies for MS

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an autoimmune disease. Your immune system attacks your central nervous system and damages your nerve fibers. That makes it hard for your brain to “talk” with the rest of your body and causes symptoms like weakness, tingling or numbness in your limbs, trouble speaking, chronic pain, depression, and vision loss.

Several medications are used to treat MS. They can cause serious side effects, and over time, they can stop working for some people. But a new treatment involving stem cells may work for people who have relapsing-remitting MS (RRMS) and haven’t been helped by other medicines.

With RRMS, you’ll have no symptoms or very mild ones for a period of time. Then you’ll have severe symptoms, which is called a relapse, for a short while. RRMS eventually can turn into another form of the disease, where your symptoms don’t ever go away.

Stem cells can turn into different kinds of cells in your body. Hematopoietic stem cells make blood cells. Some doctors use a type of stem cell treatment called hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) to treat RRMS. But more research is needed to know how well HSCT works against it.

With HSCT, doctors give you medication to help you make more bone marrow stem cells. Then they take some blood and save the stem cells from it to use later. You’ll next get high doses of chemotherapy and other strong medications to severely slow down your immune system. This is done in a hospital, and you may need to stay there up to 11 days.

Your doctor puts the stem cells into your bloodstream so they can become new white blood cells and help your body build a new, healthy immune system. You’ll also get medicines like antibiotics to help fight off infections and other illnesses until your immune system can do its job again.

Treatment usually takes several weeks. Recovery may take several months. Every person is different, but when treatment is successful, your immune system should be back to full strength in 3 to 6 months.

HSCT doesn’t work for everyone with MS. Most people who get it are taking part in research studies called clinical trials that test if a treatment or medication is safe and effective.