People affected by a form of incurable blindness have become the first to benefit from embryonic stem-cell transplants, scientists say.
The results of a clinical trial indicated that the pioneering treatment, based on cells derived from human embryos, was safe and led to substantial improvements in more than half the patients’ eyesight.
The results, published in The Lancet, mark a turning point at which the promise of stem-cell therapies, predicted for years by those involved in experiments and animal tests, has been realised in a trial.
Robert Lanza, chief scientific officer of Advanced Cell Technology in Massachusetts, said: “People have been waiting for this success. For years, they’ve been saying ‘You have great results in mice and rats. What about humans?’”
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