Chennai: Erectile dysfunction that can impact a man’s life is still a tough condition to handle.
“As far as I have seen, methods used by taking autologous cells into consideration have not worked. Even the use of peripheral mononuclear cells haven’t worked. So, as of now we are unsure of the methods. Research is still going on,” said andrologist and urologist S S Vasan, who works with Manipal Fertility, Mangaluru.
He made the statement while presenting his paper titled ‘Stem Cell Research: Evidence Today‘ as part of the 34th national conference on sexology organised by Asia-Oceania Federation for Sexology (AOFS) in association with Council of Sex Education and Parenthood International (CSEPI) here recently.
He said, “A decade ago, gene therapy was promising as it was believed that it can enable a vector-induced mechanism and make a tissue grow. Nowhere in the world has gene therapy been successful, but now it has disappeared due to its shortcomings and stem cell therapy is being tried out.”
Considering the success rate of stem cells, the usage of certain stem cells are banned as per the Drug Controller General of India rules.
“In India, we can use only multipotent stem cells autologous and minimally-manipulated cells are considered to be legal,” he said.
Multipotent stem cells are found in cord blood, adipose tissue and bone marrow, and autologous stands for using ones own blood forming stem cells.
“The study also shows that autologous platelet-rich plasma (PRP) has no beneficial effect in erectile dysfunction,” he added.