In the country, there is a facility identified as the first medical center in South East Asia to offer the most advanced regenerative medical procedures. It utilizes state-of-the-art processing, delivery, and preservation of medical-grade Adipose-Derived Regenerative Cells (ADRCs). Located at Zuellig Bldg. Makati Avenue cor. Paseo De Roxas, Makati City, EA Regenerative Medicine Center of Excellence follows the most stringent clinical protocols, registries and standards of operations.
The center makes use of the Celution System from Cytori Therapeutics USA. Their process involves the extraction of unwanted fats derived from the patient’s own body and isolating the healthy therapeutic cells which can then be administered for the treatment of a whole range of age-related conditions like cardiovascular diseases, orthopedics, muscle, ligament and soft tissue injuries, gastrointestinal disorders, pain management, and procedures for plastic and reconstructive surgery that ensure the safest, most natural, and efficient healing process available to modern health science.
SO HOW DOES IT WORK?
There are stem cells throughout the human body, but they’re rare and difficult to access. The problem facing companies interested in treatment models is this: in order to get therapeutic numbers, you have to grow the stem cells in cultures.
This process fundamentally transforms the cells, based on their time in culture. Under existing FDA regulations, it also effectively makes any treatment derived from a drug, with all the development costs, regulatory hurdles and expenses to get over before having a product to bring to patients.
“There’s really not a tissue in the body where, with impunity and effectively no risk, you can take a liter’s worth from anybody,” says David Oxley, Cytori vice president.
But there is your body fat—the thing most of us hate wearing around our waistlines the most.
Fat tissue is one of the sources of therapeutic levels of stem cells. “There’s no comparison,” says Dr. Eder Garcia Dizon, managing director of EA Regenerative Medicine Center of Excellence. “Even bone marrow and cord blood as source pales in comparison from a volume and number of cells perspective.”
The Celution system was devised by Cytori to get those cells from the patient’s fat tissue to their targeted area of need as quickly and efficiently as possible.
THE PROCEDURE IN A NUTSHELL
The current version of the Celution machine used by the center is about the size of a small washing machine, with a user interface, a canister that holds the patient’s fat tissue, and a port where the doctor can insert a syringe to remove the filtered cells. “So you can go from a liter of the patient’s fat tissue to a syringe with 5 cc’s of what looks like cloudy red liquid,” says Dr. Dizon.
The procedure would go as follows: In the first phase, the heart patient lies down in the treatment room, and the doctor wheels in the Celution System. With a little shot of painkiller, the doctor uses one of the machine’s tools to perform a modest liposuction to extract a liter’s supply of tissue from the patient’s abdominal fat.
Second phase: Over the next hour, the machine goes to work, like a centrifuge, extracting from the fat tissue, a collection of highly potent ADRCs and makes them available for the doctor to reintroduce via syringe into the body – indeed right to the patient’s heart.
“The third part is like a cardiac catheterization,” says Dr. Dizon. “This is done, also as an outpatient, through a needle stick in the groin or in the arm. That would require local anesthesia with some IV sedation.”
The doctor would thread the catheter up into the patient’s heart, using x-ray fluoroscopy, drive the catheter around the organ, inject the cells in the right place, pull it out and put a band-aide on it.
The cells are now poised to begin to rebuild the damaged muscle tissue.
ADRCS FOR HEART TREATMENT
That is the model in a nutshell, says Dr. Dizon. “Facilitating the physician or the hospital to have access to the cells of the patient—in a single procedure, at the bedside – with pharmaceutical-grade cells, and very inexpensively.”
From a scientific perspective, it’s interesting that the solution of ADRCs being applied to the tissue of interest is not a pure population of stem cells. It’s unique mix of cells that appear to be particularly useful in all of the basic physiology of wound healing. In addition to adult stem cells, there are endothelial cells, vascular smooth muscle cells, leukocytes (white blood cells) and endothelial progenitor cells.
These cells derived from adipose tissue can turn into muscle cells, cartilage, liver cells, and neuronal cells.
“They need a push to do that,” says Dr. Dizon. “But they’re very adept at making new blood supply, healing a tissue that’s been damaged by, let’s say, a heart attack, a disk that’s been injured through herniation, a wound or tissue that’s been radiated, because of cancer, and restoring that tissue back to the way it was prior to radiation.”
The Celution System has been used successfully outside the US for treating serious burns, breast reconstruction and tissue deformity.
But the most lifesaving application that Cytori wants to expand on is the treatment of heart disease.
The current US trial is called Athena, to test the procedure on patients suffering from refractory heart failure, a condition unresponsive to medication and often leading to frequent hospitalization.
“If the trial goes well,” says Oxley, “we’ll go into our final definitive trial, which would make this the first approved cell therapy for cardiovascular disease, or heart failure, in the US.”
Cytori is not without competitors. But Oxley is optimistic.
“We think that, given where the competition is, and where we are, there’s a reasonable chance that we’re the first commercial therapy for heart failure using a cell therapy.”
www.earegenmed.com