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Published online 9 September 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.894
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Stem-cell drug fails crucial trials
Experimental treatment does not halt fatal complication of bone-marrow transplant.
The failure of late-stage clinical trials that used a stem-cell therapy to treat a rare condition has dealt a setback to stem-cell research. The two studies looked at graft-versus-host disease (GvHD), a potentially fatal complication of bone-marrow transplantation in which immune cells from the donated marrow attack the recipient.
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I think cell therapy advocates should learn some true lessons from this failure and not just go on with another trial-and-fail. Looking back carefully at the pre-clinical trial data (the complete set, not just the selected set) and making sure that a promising clinical trial is really worthy of the effort. We should not take another 20 years to repeat the general failure of gene therapy.
Research is born to conquer these difficulties. No failure, no success. As long as we wanted to do, we gonna think out of ways of solving this problem and to make it better.
It's impressive that this is not a safety concern, which encourage us to go on.