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Hadassah hospital’s stem cell hope for MS breakthrough

Kate Mani
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Published: 7 March 2018

Last updated: 4 March 2024

“LIFE IS LIKE an egg timer, sand is going through and it’s going to finish. I want the doctors to turn the timer around and start the sand again.”

That is how prominent British media lawyer Mark Lewis described his life in a documentary aired on UK Channel 4 in November 2017.

The cause of this disappearing sand is Multiple Sclerosis or MS, an inflammatory and degenerative disorder of the nervous system. The currently incurable condition attacks with symptoms including vision impairment, muscle spasticity, tremors, fatigue, cognitive fog and slurred speech.

“If you can’t understand me, it’s because of my English accent,” he said as he addressed the audience at Caulfield’s Beth Weizmann Centre on Monday night. “Two years ago, if you couldn’t understand me, it was because of my MS.”

Lewis is speaking in Melbourne and Sydney this week to promote and raise funds for the clinical trial in which he participated at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. The trial, known as STEM, has had remarkably positive effects on the condition that has plagued the 53-year-old since his twenties.

The process involved extracting the patient’s own mesenchymal stem cells found in fat tissue, umbilical cord and bone marrow and reinjecting them back into the spinal fluid.

Lewis is accompanied in Australia by Professor Tamir Ben-Hur, Department of Neurology chairman and director of the Clinical Neurosciences Division at Hadassah Hebrew University Medical Centre.

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Professor Ben-Hur explained how preliminary results suggest this procedure can protect damaged neurons and may also help repair damaged cells.

“We found these cells can alleviate the inflammatory process that causes the disease. By lowering the inflammatory process, you stop the basic process of injury…[and] you can stop the injury from growing,” he said.

“These cells…have this potential to activate the dormant repair processes in the brain and help the brain repair itself.”

The research has been overseen by Professor Dimitrios Karussis, Director of Multiple Sclerosis Centre at Hadassah’s Department of Neurology.

In a written statement presented at the event, Professor Karussis explained that the clinical trial is now complete and the data and results are being compiled for submission to a peer-reviewed journal later this year.
If you can’t understand me, it’s because of my English accent. Two years ago, if you couldn’t understand me, it was because of my MS.

Professor Ben-Hur believes that although the trial’s results are not yet confirmed, Hadassah has made immense progress in the field of MS research and can continue to make a difference.

“We are hopeful, we are optimistic…after we hear the results we’ll be able to decide what’s next,” he says. “There is light at the end of the tunnel.”

Prior to participating in the Hadassah clinical trial, Mark Lewis became known across the world as the lawyer who brought down Rupert Murdoch’s London paper News of the World following the 2011 phone tapping scandal.

Despite legal career successes, Lewis was losing strength in his limbs, with overwhelming fatigue leading to life in a wheelchair. “I knew the sands were running out,” he said. “I was so tired; things weren’t going so well. By chance I heard about the trial at Hadassah.”

The process involved 11 trips to Israel to remove stem cells, reinject them on two occasions and undergo detailed neurological evaluation, including tests for walking, hand dexterity and cognitive ability.

The positive results for Lewis following the first stem cell reinjection were almost instantaneous. “I could lift my right leg up, I could wiggle my fingers, I could open my right hand.”

“I am always conscious of the Jewish saying…‘if I forget you O Jerusalem, may my right hand wither and die’. My right hand had withered and died but Jerusalem didn’t forget me. It was the most amazing technology which made my right hand come back to life.”

His trial was a randomised double blind trial, where neither patients nor professors and doctors knew if the injections given would work, or would be merely a placebo.

Lewis’ second injection appears to have been a placebo as he experienced no difference in his condition, contrasting with the success of the first procedure. He admits the progress achieved from the first injection has since plateaued.

“I would have said the first injection improved me by about 60%. Then over a number of months it went back to about 20% improvement from where it started, but it didn’t go worse than 20%.”

Lewis’ speech in Melbourne was followed by an emotional plea by his wife Mandy Blumenthal to seek donations for the STEM project. She described how since meeting Mark, MS has been an intertwined element of both their lives.

“There were three people in my relationship, Mark, myself and MS. It’s not only the person who has the physical symptoms who ‘has’ MS.”

“MS can be really cruel, it’s evil. We don’t know who it is going to affect, when it’s going to affect people.”

She called upon audience members to back Hadassah in taking their research to the next stage. “We don’t have the luxury to leave it to others, we need more money going to Hadassah. I’m asking you to help my Mark, and everybody else’s Mark.”

Blumenthal left the audience with a message of hope for MS sufferers and those caring and sharing the illness with them. “I’ve seen it with my own eyes, results people said were impossible.”

To donate to STEM research, visit www.hadassahaustralia.org/newsletter-dec-17/

Photo: Mark Lewis, left, and Professor Tamir Ben-Hur (Peter Haskin)

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