Stem cell injection successfully treats urinary incontinence
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It started when Deborah Bishop was still in her 20s.
Always athletic -- she had participated in field hockey, speed skating and baseball -- Ms. Bishop was doing jumping jacks when she noticed to her embarrassment that she had leaked urine.
As the weeks wore on, the Canadian woman began to have more and more of these accidents. It wasn't just strenuous exercise that caused them, but also being tickled or coughing or sneezing.
The condition is known as stress urinary incontinence, and researchers say it may affect hundreds of millions of people around the world, primarily women, who are more susceptible because of their anatomy.
Today, Ms. Bishop, 54, is "90 percent" normal on her urinary leakage, she said -- all because of an injection of her own stem cells that she received three years ago.
The cells, known officially as autologous muscle-derived cells, were taken out of her thigh, multiplied several times over in the lab, and then injected into the muscles around her urethra, the opening at the neck of the bladder.
While many people still associate the phrase "stem cells" with ethical debates over using embryos, these stem cells have nothing to do with that.
All of us have stem cells in various parts of our bodies that can develop into mature cells and are used to repair muscle, nerve and tissue damage.
In this case, researcher Johnny Huard at the University of Pittsburgh developed a technique for finding stem cells in muscle tissue and then purifying and multiplying them. The biomedical firm Cook MyoSite Inc. bought the licensing rights to his technique and is overseeing the current tests on treating stress urinary incontinence.
The idea is that the stem cells will create new cells that will strengthen the muscles that control urination. Even though the initial trials were focused on testing the safety of the procedure, 60 to 70 percent of the women have shown a significant decrease in their urinary leakage, said Ryan Pruchnic, Cook MyoSite's director of operations.
Lesley Carr, Ms. Bishop's physician and a urologist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, said there is no medication that helps with this most prevalent form of incontinence. Up to now, the primary last-resort therapy has been surgical insertion of a mesh sling around the urethra.
The surgery is effective, Dr. Carr said, but "there are rare but recognized complications," including pain and infections, and women face up to six weeks of restricted activity after the operation.
First Published February 13, 2012 12:00 am
