The company, Osiris Therapeutics of Columbia, Md., said Thursday that Canadian regulators had approved its drug Prochymal, to treat children suffering fromgraft-versus-host disease, a potentially deadly complication of bone marrow transplantation.
“It’s really a good day for the concept and the hope behind stem cell therapies becoming a reality,” C. Randal Mills, the chief executive of Osiris, said in an interview.
Prochymal is a preparation of mesenchymal stem cells, which are obtained from the bone marrow of healthy young adult donors. The stem cells are separated out from the marrow and expanded in culture, so that one donation is enough to make as many as 10,000 doses.
Because these are adult stem cells, they do not raise the ethical concerns of embryonic stem cells, whose creation usually involves the destruction of human embryos.
Graft-versus-host disease occurs when the immune cells in a bone-marrow transplant see the recipient’s organs as foreign and attack them, causing potentially severe damage to the skin, liver and digestive tract. This happens most often when the donor is not an exact match for the recipient.
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