Abstract: Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a fatal neurodegenerative disease that causes progressive muscular atrophy and death within 3–5 years after its onset. Despite the signifcant advances in knowledge of ALS pathology, no effective treatment is available. Therefore, it is imperative to search for new alternatives to treat ALS. Cell therapy, especially using bone-marrow cells, has showed to be very useful to protect the neural tissue in different brain disease or traumatic lesions. In ALS, most published results show benefcial effects of the use bone marrow cells, especially mesenchymal stromal cells. However, until now, the best outcome extends animal’s lifespan by only a few weeks. It is essential to continue the search for a really effective therapy, testing different cells, routes and time-windows of administration. Studying the mechanisms that initiate and spread the degenerative process is also important to fnd out an effective therapy. Therefore, we discussed here some progresses that have been made using bone-marrow cell therapy as a therapeutic tool for ALS.

Key words: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, cell therapy, bone-marrow mononuclear cells, mesenchymal stromal cells, neuroinflammation, motor neurons