FASTER, PLEASE: Stroke patients are walking again after being injected with stem cells.

People who’ve experienced a stroke have seen “remarkable” improvements in speech, strength, and mobility after having stem cells injected into their brains – with some even regaining the ability to walk.

It’s still very early days, but the success of this small trial suggests that we’ve seriously underestimated the brain’s ability to heal itself, and might one day be able to trigger it into regaining lost functionality.

“One 71-year-old woman could only move her left thumb at the start of the trial,” neurosurgeon and lead researcher, Gary Steinberg from Stanford University, told Andy Coghlan at New Scientist. “She can now walk and lift her arm above her head.”

This is the second trial that’s looked into how stem cell injections into patient’s brain can improve stroke recovery – a study carried out in the UK last year also showed similarly promising results in patients, more than a year after treatment. . . .

So how does it work? The technique involves injecting stem cells through a borehole in the skull into regions of the brain that are known to control motor movements, and which have been damaged by stroke.

The team still doesn’t know exactly how this helps mobility, but with each trial they’re getting a clearer picture of what’s going on, and it seems the key is triggering the brain to become ‘young’ again.

The injected stem cells are called mesenchymal stem cells, which in this trial had been donated from the bone marrow of two healthy donors, and were genetically engineered to express a gene called Notch1 – known to trigger brain development in babies. Each patient got either 2.5, 5, or 10 million of these cells.

In rats, researchers showed that these injected cells don’t seem to last more than a month in the brain, but during that time, they seem to secrete growth factors that triggered new connections to form between brain cells, and tissue regeneration.

So, adult stem cells again. Lots of progress there. As I’ve noted before: “When I started InstaPundit, the talk was all about embryonic stem cells. But it appears that much of the real action is in adult stem cells. I remember in 2004 Michael J. Fox flushed half (or more) of his fan base with an ad calling Republicans unscientific haters over this very issue.”