Regenerative Medicine for Erectile Dysfunction Following Radical Prostatectomy: Are we Ready?

Available online 19 February 2016 1.5 (±SD: 0.8)% of the cells where fibroblastoid colony forming units, a subset of which probably represents true mesenchymal stem cells. The authors state that 26% are stromal cells and the markers that are used to define stromal cells in the stromal vascular fraction cells are inIn an elegantly written paper, Haahr and colleagues from Odense, Denmark, document the first phase 1 trial using autologous adiposederived regenerative cells in patients with erectile dysfunction following radical prostatectomy. These results have long been awaited. In 2010, Tom Lue's group atUCSF published thefirst preclinical data on adipose tissue derived stem cell treatment in a rat model of cavernous nerve neuropraxia (a model that accurately and efficiently represents the pathophysiology of erectile dysfunction following nerve-sparing radical prostatectomy) (Albersen et al., 2010). Now six years later, the first clinical trial studying injection of regenerative cells derived from adipose tissue is published in EBioMedicine (Haahr et al., 2016). The advent of the first clinical data forces us as a scientific community to contemplate on whether or not we are ready for clinical translation of stem cell therapy for a non-lethal disease.