Dr. Joy Kong traces stem cell therapy for autoimmune disease from bone-marrow transplants in the 1960s to newer MIC cells that work without HLA matching. MIC cells home to damaged tissue and avoid the infection risk and disease recurrence that plague traditional transplants.
So autoimmune disease is one of the places where stem cell therapy really shines. The first stem cell therapy is using the bone marrow. In the 60s, they didn't know they were doing stem cell therapy. They were just transplanting bone marrow. But then later on we realized that that's actually stem cell therapy. So using a donor's bone marrow, that's one of the first ways of doing stem cell therapy. So the hematopoietic stem cells, those are the major, one of the major stem cell types in the bone marrow. But that has a lot of potentials for rejection. So you need immune suppressive medications, and that can really take a toll on patients. Or you can use your own. But that is linked to a lot of morbidity and mortality, including infections. And recurrence is pretty common. So MIC is kind of is the newer cell type on the block, so you can get give it to people. Sometimes completely unmatched. And people are doing great, having all kinds of therapeutic responses. So even with mismatch, HLA mismatch, they can home into the damaged tissue and exert clinical benefit, and the benefit tends to be much more sustained.
