Richard Fessler, MD, on OPC1 Improving Quality of Life With Spinal Cord Injury
The professor of neurosurgery at Rush University Medical School discussed follow-up in the phase 1/2 trial of LCTOPC1 and further research to be done.
“Fifty percent of individuals with spinal cord injury, at some point in their life will have a fracture. And that's because their bones become demineralized. So, we're trying to figure out why, and what we can do to stop that, so that we can minimize fractures in these patients. So,they're living normal life expectancy now, but we want to give them as good a quality of life as we potentially can.”
Lineage Cell Therapeutics’ oligodendrocyte progenitor cell therapy candidate OPC1 has shown good safety and promising efficacy in patients with spinal cord injury (SCI) and is continuing to be evaluated in long-term follow-up of a phase 1/2 trial (NCT02302157). The company plans to meet with the FDA this year in a Type B Meeting to discuss a proposed amendment to the Investigational New Drug application (IND) for OPC1 to enable clinical testing of a novel spinal cord delivery system.
CGTLive spoke with the study’s primary investigator, Richard Fessler, MD, a professor of neurosurgery at Rush University Medical School, to learn more about the trial. He talked about 10-year follow-up data that have recently been published which showed no serious adverse events of interest in the treated patients and quality-of-life improvements after treatment with OPC1. He also shared his experiences with keeping up with these patients, who he called inspirational, over the last 10 years and being able to see these improvements and keep up with their lives.
