The National Institutes of Health (NIH) have announced the awarding of a $3 million grant to Children’s Hospital of Orange County (CHOC) in California to study stem cells in autistic children.

More specifically, ordinary fibroblasts (skin cells) will be derived from the autistic children, which will then be reprogrammed and de-differentiated into iPS (induced pluripotent stem) cells which in turn will be re-differentiated into neural cells. Scientists hope that properties of the neural cells will shed some light on the unique characteristics of autism, thereby ultimately leading to more efficacious forms of treatment for the disorder.

Funding from the NIH grant is to be distributed over 5 years and will result in the first repository of neural cells derived from living patients. Prior to the recent development of iPS technology, the only way to derived neural cells from someone was via autopsy after death. Now, however, any living person can easily donate an ordinary skin cell, which, from the intermediate stage of an iPS cell, can be reprogrammed into virtually any type of cell found within the human body.

The grant was awarded through the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The specific recipient of the grant at CHOC is the National Human Neural Stem Cell Resource program, and the award constitutes the largest federally funded basic science research grant that any department within CHOC has ever received.

According to Dr. Philip Schwartz, principal investigator and founding director of the National Human Neural Stem Cell Resource at CHOC, "This is a completely novel approach to studying the neurobiology of autism and the first time we’ll be able to do so with neural cells actually derived from large numbers of children living with the condition. We hope to confirm over the next several years that neural cells generated from these donated fibroblasts can provide a viable experimental model that will yield insights about the origins, diagnosis, and treatment of autism."

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) constitute the fastest growing developmental disability in the United States, with approximately one child in every 150 being diagnosed with some form of ASD. According to the Autism Society of America, the rate of diagnosis increases between 10 and 17% every year. Although an indisputable, definitive etiology has not yet been proven, a certain amount of controversy continues to surround ASD, as a growing amount of evidence seems to implicate environmental causes as the initiating trigger of ASD, especially heavy metals such as the mercury that is traceable directly to thimerosal. Also known as sodium ethylmercurithiosalicylate (C9H9HgNaO2S), thimerosal was originally developed as an antiseptic and antifungal agent but continues to be routinely used as a preservative in childhood vaccines. The controversy surrounding thimerosal, however, and its possible link to autism, has resulted in the gradual phasing out of thimerosal in the U.S., the European Union and a few other countries. Nevertheless, by 2007 it was estimated that more than 5,000 families in the U.S. have filed claims in a federal vaccine court alleging that their children became autistic as a result of having been vaccinated with thimerosal-containing vaccines. Although most of the cases are still being adjudicated, the U.S. federal government did award damages in one case, to the family of a young girl with the pre-existing condition of mitochondrial enzyme deficiency, who subsequently developed autism after receiving a series of thimerosal-containing vaccines. Many parents regard this ruling as confirmation that thimerosal is indeed a cause of autism.

A number of prominent scientists have researched the autism-vaccine connection extensively, perhaps the most notable of whom was Bernard Rimland, Ph.D., of San Diego, who founded the Autism Society of America in 1965 and who also founded the Autism Research Institute (ARI) in 1967, which he directed until his death from cancer in 2006. Inspired by his autistic son, Mark, who was born in 1956 when autism was quite rare, Dr. Rimland dedicated the remainder of his life to finding a scientific explanation and cure for the disorder. After more than 40 years of research, he became increasingly convinced that the causes of autism can be traced directly to the increasing number of vaccines that are prescribed in childhood. Dr. Rimland was one of the first scientists to correlate the increasing number of autism diagnoses per year to the presence of mercury in vaccines, pointing out that in 1990 autism was diagnosed at a frequency of one child per every 10,000 (ten thousand) children, whereas by 2004 the frequency had risen to one child per every 150 children, which represents an increase of 6,670%. A prolific author and energetic lecturer on autism, Dr. Rimland garnered the attention of Hollywood who invited him to serve as primary technical advisor to the 1988 movie "Rain Man", in which Dustin Hoffman’s character portrayed the disorder, thereby initiating a global awareness of autism at a time when it was not nearly as prevalent as it is today. Although Dr. Rimland was often at odds with the conventional medical establishment, to this day the ARI data bank, which Dr. Rimland created, remains the world’s largest data bank on autism, containing over 40,000 detailed case histories of autistic children from more than 60 countries. Dr. Rimland’s 1964 book, "Infantile Autism: The Syndrome and Its Implications for a Neural Theory of Behavior", remains a seminal, ground-breaking book in the field, and is credited by many with having changed the prevailing medical view of autism at that time from a disorder that was regarded as purely psychiatric in nature, to one that is now recognized as being distinctly biological.

Families of autistic individuals who are interested in donating cells to the CHOC for study under the NIH grant should contact CHOC directly for further information.

Kenneth Kelley, an eight-year old child from the Bangor area will be the first person from Maine to receive adult stem cell therapy for autism. Stem cell therapy for the treatment of autism has been performed in many North American children who have traveled to the ICM clinic in Central America, with several news reports of patient improvements, and one scientific publication from the group supporting the rationale for this therapy (Ichim et al. Stem Cell Therapy for Autism. 2007 Jun 27;5:30).

Autism is a disorder of the brain that occurs as a child is growing up, and is associated with repetitive behavior, lack of ability to interact socially, and impaired communication skills. To date there is no cure for autism, although a variety of experimental interventions are being performed with varying degrees of success.
Adult stem cell therapy for autism is based on the idea that a chronic inflammatory condition in the gut of autistic children may resolve or at least diminished from the healing effects of the mesenchymal stem cells. The other stem cell type that is used for treatment of autism comes from the cord blood. Cord blood stem cells have been demonstrated by numerous American and international scientific groups to secrete factors that promote healing of nerves and enhance oxygenation of the brain.

Marty Kelly, mother of Kenneth, like many parents of autistic children, initially could not believe the diagnosis of autism. Kenneth was 2 years old when his doctors made the diagnosis, which is believed to be made in as many as 1 in 144 children. Marty Kelly, determined to do something about it, arranged for Kenneth to start receiving hyperbaric oxygen treatments for her son, which caused an improvement in his condition. According to her:

"One of the first things we did was buy a hyperbaric oxygen chamber and within a couple of days, he actually sat down and traced the alphabet from A to Z by himself which was huge. First time he’d ever done that."

Hyperbaric oxygen increases growth factor production in the brain, as well as, by providing oxygen theoretically overcomes some of the problems reported in autistic children such as poor oxygenation of certain parts of the brain. In the case of Kenneth, while there were improvements, these were not cures and the underlying condition still caused significant suffering in the Kelley household:

"It’s really hard because he just we can’t go anywhere and we can’t have anyone over. He just screams all day."

Marty is confident adult stem cell therapy will cause benefits in Kenneth based on knowledge of previous children who have been treated with varying degrees of success.

To discuss and learn more about adult stem cell therapy for autism, an Autism Biomedical support group is being created. The first meeting is july 18th at 10 am. To learn more, call 942-2459.

Click the play button in the video below to watch a news report of another autistic child treated with stem cells.

Providing high quality stem cells for treatment, a Public Stem Cell Bank will be established in Chennai by the non-profit Jeevan Blood Bank company.

On Thursday, Dr. P. Srinivasan, Chairman, told reporters that about 40,000 units of stem cells collected from cord blood would be collected, processed and stored by the stem cell bank in five years. The project is set to go live before the end of March 2008.

Blood cancers, heart disease, autism, and more than 70 other medical conditions can be treated and potentially cured by stem cells. It is one of the best treatment options available today.

Srinivasan said the bank plans to collect cord blood from donors, harvest stem cells, test for transmissible infections, store and ultimately release the safe compatible units to any one who needs them across the world.

By December of 2008, completion if accreditation processes by international agencies is planned for the Jeevan Stem Cell Bank.

Private storage at the bank will be fee based. The funding would then be applied to the public side of the bank in order to pay for those services. 30 percent of the available storage has been reserved for private banking, while the other 70 percent is reserved for public storage.

So that matching units of cord blood can be identified by any hospitals across India as well as the world, the bank plans to publish the contents of a stem cell registry online in the next 12 weeks. When a suitable unit of stem cell was available, it would be transported frozen to the hospital where the patient was admitted for transplantation, he said.

By April 2009, the facility will be moved to a permanent 25,000 square feet location. In the meantime, it will operate on rental premises said Srinivasan.

Costa Rica is the destination for a seven year old boy named Matthew from Central Florida. The boy and his family are traveling not for a vacation, but with the hope of curing the boys autism, which was diagnosed when he was 18 months old.

“He wasn’t born with autism,” Matthew’s father Daniel Faiella said.

Matthew began to lose his ability to speak as he got older.

The future of medicine could potentially be revolutionized because of stem cells. This very reason has kept scientists working night and day all over the world in an effort to better understand the mechanisms that ensure the self-renewal of these cells and their capability to treat human disease.

With an active role in replacing dying cells and regenerating tissue, somatic stem cells, which are better known as adult stem cells, can be found in the human body. With such high therapeutic potential, these cells have become the subject of numerous research studies because of their ability to self-renew and generate cells identical to those of the organ from which they originate.

Via bone marrow transplant, various types of blood and bone cancers such as leukemia have already been treated using adult stem cells. The U.S. Government has given more research funds to institutes who study adult stem cells since they don