Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine launched a 5-year clinical trial program starting 2014 in order to investigate the safety of NSCs transplantation in patients with chronic SCIs (University of California 2014). A recent clinical trial on humans, the SciStar study, has been using oligodendrocyte progenitors to treat people with recent SCIs. This study not only has proven to be effective so far but has lately passed major safety issues and therefore was approved to expand by increasing the number of both enrolled patients and the transplanted cells per patient (California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) 2016). Although this study aims at evaluating the safety and effectiveness of AST-OPC1 agent, which consists of oligodendrocyte progenitor cells produced from human ESCs, in patients with recent SCI, results can be promising as regards potential use of iPSCs instead of human ESCs in this context.
