ISTOCK, SANJAGRUJICCan one grow old without growing frail? One company is banking on the idea that with the right treatment, the answer can be ‘yes’ for many more people. In clinical trials published in October in the Journals of Gerontology, Longeveron, the firm developing the therapy, reports that a single infusion of mesenchymal stem cells from younger donors had no apparent safety downsides for people with aging-related frailty—and spurred improvement in many of their symptoms.
The work is “one of the first studies that actually attempts to address [frailty] in a well-defined or well-described fashion, and certainly, to my knowledge, the first such study with mesenchymal stem cells,” says Keith March, a cardiologist who directs the Center for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Florida and was not involved in the trials.
“We looked at a variety of measures, and what was exciting to us was we saw four or five different things in different organ systems that improved—and this was repeated in two studies, in two separate groups of people,” says Joshua Hare, who directs the Interdisciplinary Stem Cell Institute at the University of Miami and cofounded Longeveron. The outcomes that improved included a six-minute walking test and levels ...
