If this article was meant to reassure us, it has not, just flagged another batch of 'alternative facts' or perhaps 'post truths" that early 2017 is throwing our way to cope with!If Professor Mackay-Sim genuinely wants to correct misinformation about the link between his work and that of the Polish team, then he should start by dealing with his own biography posted on the Griffith University site, and easily found on Trove. It reads: "Professor Mackay-Sim is a neuroscientist interested in using stem cells for two purposes: for understanding causes of neuropsychiatric diseases and for transplantation repair of the nervous system.
He is using patient-derived stem cells to understand the cellular causes of two genetically complex diseases: schizophrenia and Parkinson's disease, and two disease caused by mutations in single genes: Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia, and ataxia telangiectasia.
He uses adult stem cells from the olfactory mucosa, the organ of smell in the nose and has established NeuroBank, a biobank of olfactory stem cells from more than 300 people with various neurological diseases.
He is also using induced pluripotent stem cells generated by genetically engineering skin cells from patients with schizophrenia and Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia.
Professor Mackay-Sim was scientific director of a clinical trial in which cells from the nose (called "olfactory ensheathing cells") were transplanted into the injured spinal cord to test their safety in three paraplegic patients. This trial provided a world-first precedent for a recent clinical trial in Poland in which a patient was able to walk after being transplanted with his own olfactory ensheathing cells."
One assumes he had input into writing this if not the AOTY submission.
Jacquelin Magnay tells us: "Mackay-Sim defended his work as the precursor to the use of nasal stem cells in the treatment of advanced spinal cord injuries." Again we fall again into the post truth era as the clinical trial performed by Prof Mackay-Sim’s team in 2004 did not implant nasal stem cells, but rather olfactory ensheathing cells (OECs). These are a strange cell type with some properties of Schwann cells, glia and fibroblasts. But they are not stem cells. In his own publication discussing the choice of these cells to implant Prof Mackay-Sim noted as a positive characteristic their lack of proliferation compared to stem cells: "In contrast, olfactory ensheathing cells cease proliferating after transplantation into the spinal cord (Deng et al., 2006)."
So where are we going here? This is surely harmful to the reputation of the Australian scientific community and must be incomprehensible to many lay folk. In his description of the difference between the Polish team's techniques and his own, it is the information omitted by Prof Mackay-Sim which is important, rather than, for example, the post-operative rehabilitation. This was an entirely different procedure performed on a patient with a stab wound to his spinal cord. In this case, his doctors performed a very invasive procedure, doing a craniotomy and removing part of the patients brain, the olfactory bulb. They then performed complex neurosurgery implanting this brain-derived tissue, his nasal tissue and nerve grafts, acting as potential scaffolds, into the area of damaged cord. This procedure, and the partial clinical benefit documented since, clearly did not follow on from Prof Mackay-Sim's work.
