Osteoporosis fractures fall by 94% in small first-in-human stem cell trial
Somewhere in the world, a woman over 50 will have fractured a bone by the time you finish reading this sentence due to osteoporosis, a silent bone disease that can weaken the structural integrity of the skeletal system and ...
Menopause-associated estrogen loss makes the burden of this disease higher in women globally, as 1 in 3 women over age 50 is at risk of suffering an osteoporosis-related fracture.
A recent study published in Cell explored a novel stem cell therapy for advanced osteoporosis that cleverly uses a patient's own stem cells as a biological targeting tag, binding to blood vessels in the bone marrow and guiding the infused stem cells directly to damaged bone tissue.
In a first-in-human trial, 10 women over 50 with advanced osteoporosis received an infusion of the specially engineered repair cells via a single intravenous (IV) drip.
In the first two years after treatment, fractures caused by weakened bones fell by 94%, from eight fractures per year to 0.5 fractures per year, across the group. Post-treatment bone biopsies showed that the mean bone tissue area nearly doubled in just four months. Most patients also reported less pain after receiving the infusion, with a 34% reduction at month 24.
Mending the weak and fragile
Experimental workflow for isolation and exofucosylation of autoBM-MSCs for clinical applications. Credit: Cell (2026). DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2026.08.017
(A) Patient histories with study timeline (years/months shown at figure bottom). In enrollment order, each patient is presented as a separate row. Credit: Cell (2026). DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2026.08.017