Cell Therapy Clinical Trials for Stress Urinary Incontinence: Current Status and Perspectives.

Abstract

Stress urinary incontinence (SUI) affects 200 million people worldwide. Standard therapies often provide symptomatic relief, but without targeting the underlying etiology, and show tremendous patient-to-patient variability, limited success and complications associated with the procedures. We review in this article the latest clinical trials performed to treat SUI using cell-based therapies. These therapies, despite typically including only a small number of patients and short term evaluation of results, have proven to be feasible and safe. However, there is not yet a consensus for the best cell source to be used to treat SUI and not all patients may be suitable for these therapies. Therefore, more clinical trials should be promoted recruiting large number of patients and evaluating long term results.