Neuralstem Alzheimer's Disease Animal Data Presented At The Congress Of Neurological Surgeons Annual Meeting

Neuralstem, Inc. (NYSE MKT:

) announced that the first data in a study transplanting its neural stem cells in an animal model of Alzheimer's disease was presented at the Congress of Neurological Surgeons Annual Meeting, yesterday, in Boston, MA. In a late-breaking science oral presentation titled, "Peri-hippocampal stem cell transplantation rescues cognitive decline in Alzheimer's disease," Osama N. Kashlan, MD, of the departments of Neurology and Neurosurgery at the University of Michigan Medical School, concluded that HK532: IGF1 (NSI-532.IGF) cells rescued spatial learning and memory deficits in mice with an animal model of Alzheimer's disease. NSI-532.IGF cells, Neuralstem's second stem cell product, are a cortical neural stem cell line that has been engineered to produce human insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1), which has been shown to have wide-ranging neuroprotective properties. Furthermore, the researchers also reported that the cells, which were injected in the peri-hippocampal region, survived for up to ten weeks. The hippocampus plays an important role in memory encoding and retrieval. It is also one of the first regions of the brain to be affected in Alzheimer's disease. The researchers concluded that this approach could provide a viable approach to treat Alzheimer's disease in the future. "Fourteen weeks after the surgery, the stem cell-injected mice performed significantly better than the control mice," said Dr. Kashlan. "They were smarter. We were not prepared for the magnitude of the effect, it was rather stunning. It gives us hope to be part of treating this horrendous disease. Everyone knows someone who is affected by Alzheimer's disease. These results are obviously preliminary, but very exciting. "The NSI-532.IGF stem cells used in this study are a cortical stem cell line engineered to deliver an extra therapeutic power, in this case IGF-1, in addition to the stem cells themselves," said Karl Johe, PhD, Neuralstem's Chairman and Chief Scientific Officer. "All of our ongoing human trials involve our spinal cord stem cells. This pipeline expansion into a different neural stem cell line highlights the platform nature of our technology that enables us to isolate and commercially develop stem cells from different regions of the central nervous system to treat different indications. "This is also the first instance in which we are demonstrating the ability of the cells to act as a stable delivery vehicle for gene therapy in the central nervous system (CNS)," Dr. Johe continued. "Getting large molecules across the blood brain barrier into the CNS has proven extremely difficult. Our cells, which integrate seamlessly in the CNS under the blood brain barrier, present a unique delivery vehicle to overcome this limitation. This study presents an elegant demonstration of the efficacy of this process. Although we focus on the hippocampus, the cells and the therapeutic protein distribute widely and provide global therapeutic effects throughout the brain."