Henry Louis Gehrig, popularly known as Lou Gehrig, was one of baseball’s greatest. For 17 years the heavy hitter had a spot on the New York Yankees, a team for which he helped win six world championships while earning the nickname “The Iron Horse.” Sadly, Lou Gehrig’s renowned durability was not enough to protect him, and in 1939 the Iron Horse’s career was ended by a diagnosis of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), which then took his life two years later. Out of honor of the great baseball player, ALS is now called Lou Gherig’s Disease.
Lou Gherig’s Disease is a degenerative disease that leads to the damaging of nerve cells. As the disease progresses, patients lose the ability to voluntarily move muscles, becoming paralyzed at later stages before succumbing to the disease and passing away. Unfortunately, treatment of Lou Gherig’s Disease is limited, with some medications that have been reported to slow the progress of the disease, but this may soon change.
BrainStorm Cell Therapeutics, an Israeli biotechnology company based in Tel-Aviv, has been working on fighting Lou Gherig’s Disease and other nerve cell damaging diseases. They have been developing the NurOwn adult stem cell therapy in Israel, a stem cell based treatment that is meant to treat ALS.
NurOwn has already made it through Phase II trials at Hadassah hospital of Jerusalem, and the company is planning on moving on to work on United States soil. On March 24, BrainStorm reported that the U.S. Office Patent and Trademark Office had granted them a patent for their autologous stem cell technology.
Brainstorm is still waiting for approval from the United States Food & Drug Administration. Once this approval has been given, they intend on conducting Phase II trials in the United States. There are at least three sites where they intend to conduct the trials, with signed agreements to conduct them at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, the University of Massachusetts Memorial Hospital, and very fittingly, the institution where Lou Gehrig was diagnosed, the Mayo Clinic.
Edited by
Alisen Downey
