From Crain's Detroit Business:
ALS patient is living his second miracle
Ted Harada is living his second miracle right now, savoring every minute of every hour of it for as long as it lasts. His strength is back up, there's a spring in his step, he's got a strong grip back in his hands, and the symptoms of his ALS once again are in retreat to the ongoing surprise of his doctors and to the delight of his family.
Once again, Harada is easily going up the stairs to tuck his kids in at night and give them a kiss, instead of struggling up a step at a time, having to hold onto the handrail for support. Once again, he knows - or is as close to knowing as you can with such a disease - that he is part of something that will eventually change the death-sentence prognosis that until now has been a certainty as soon as there is a diagnosis with the dreaded words no one wants to hear: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis - Lou Gehrig's disease.
"The first time, it's easy to say it was an outlier. Luck. But I've been helped twice. Twice, and you can throw luck out the window. They've got to figure out, now, what's going on with me," he says. "We've got to turn Lou Gehrig's disease into Lou Gehrig's chronic illness."
Some more:
Because Phase 1 trials are designed to test safety before any approval from the Food and Drug Administration to move on to Phase 2 trials, which test efficacy, researchers are cautious. They generally decline much comment for fear about running afoul of the bureaucrats.
But patients themselves are free to talk to anyone they want, and Harada was eager to tell his tale.
Harada, 40, is a former manager at FedEx who first noticed symptoms of ALS in 2009 while playing Marco Polo with his kids in the family swimming pool.
On March 9, 2011, he got an injection of 500,000 stem cells - the cells were derived by Rockville, Md.-based Neuralstem Inc. after a patient donated spinal-cord tissue in 2002 - as part of an 18-operation, 15-patient trial that last 2 years.
More:
About a year after the operation, Harada began to notice a gradual decline, a decline that continued until his second operation - though he was still stronger when he went into the second operation than he had been going into the first.
More:
By Oct. 20, Harada was feeling strong enough that he took part in a 2.5-mile fundraising ALS walk in Atlanta.
This is wonderful news -- turning Lou Gehrig's disease into Lou Gehrig's chronic illness.
