A 7-year old Indian-origin boy from the UK, suffering from a debilitating form of cerebral palsy and autism is set to undergo a revelutionary stem cell treatment procedure as part of a clinical trial happening in the US.

A seven-year-old Indian-origin boy who suffers from cerebral palsy left with his family for the US today for a revolutionary treatment that has the potential to improve the quality of his life and give hope to others with neurological disorders. The boy suffers from a debilitating form of cerebral palsy and autism, which means he cannot walk, talk, or sit up unaided. He is now set to undergo a pioneering clinical trial at Duke University Medical Centre in North Carolina, which relies on the infusion of his younger brother's umbilical cord blood frozen at birth.

After a lot of research on stem cells, we had decided before I got pregnant with our younger son, that we would save our child's cord blood. Then towards the end of the pregnancy in 2015, I got in touch with Duke University and they were planning on doing a sibling cord blood therapy trial, said the boy's mother. She and her husband had the umbilical cord blood of their younger child frozen and stored by UK-based blood bank Cells4Life.

Umbilical cord blood is rich in a kind of stem cell that can, in theory, help heal most parts of the body, either by stimulating growth or by transforming into the required type of mature cell. These can then be put back into the body, even many years later. It relies on a close tissue match for the recipient, to lower the odds of the body rejecting it.

When the family contacted Duke University, they were told that their younger son's blood was a match for the older son raising the prospect of the UK's first such sibling cord blood therapy on the boy. Stem cell is a cure for some and improvement for all, so we are pretty sure it will definitely have some improvement in our son's life, said the mother.

The family from Maharashtra, who have been based in London for over 15 years, are determined not to be put off by some dissenting voices within the medical community who cast doubts on the rare procedure. According to the mother, because it is not an invasive therapy, they want to go into it with a positive, nothing-to-lose attitude.

It is in its early stages and it has always been the norm that people will doubt treatments which have not been proved yet. But stem cells in general after years of proven research are known to have the ability to reach the damaged organ and regenerate new cells, she said. Claudia Rees, Operations Director at Cells4Life, describes the procedure as a cutting-edge treatment, considered a cornerstone of a relatively new area of science known as regenerative medicine.