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2 Stem Cell Therapies - Knowns and Unknowns
2 Stem Cell Therapies - Knowns and Unknowns
Pages 9-16
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From page 9... ...
• Marketing claims by clinics offering stem cell therapies are not neces sarily supported by clinical evidence in the scientific literature and may be misleading to patients. (Caulfield)
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From page 10... ...
For Wagner and his colleagues, they hypothesized that stem cells might be used to repair skin in a mouse model of epidermolysis bullosa. They evaluated the effect of treating these mice with different stem cell populations and found a population of bone marrow cells that resulted in various improvements, such as longer survival times, the absence of blisters, and the appearance of anchoring fibrils, which are missing in diseaseaffected individuals because of a genetic mutation (Tolar et al., 2009)
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From page 11... ...
These behind-the-scenes activities can be "a big deal," Wagner said, "particularly if you are a small university laboratory." Therapies Under Development At the time of the workshop, very few stem cell therapies had received approval from a regulatory oversight body, Wagner said. In North America, the FDA had approved Hemacord®, an umbilical cord blood product developed by the New York Blood Center, while Prochymal, which was developed by Osiris Therapeutics to treat acute graft-versus-host disease in children, had received market authorization from HealthCanada.1 1 In addition to Hemacord®, four other hematopoietic progenitor cell products have been approved by the FDA.
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From page 12... ...
, said Timothy Caulfield, Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy and professor in the Faculty of Law and the School of Public Health at the University of Alberta. Desperate patients are searching the Internet and being directed to clinics that look legitimate and offer treatments for virtually everything -- Alzheimer's disease, autism, aging, immune deficiencies, liver disease, cancer, diabetes, hair loss, multiple sclerosis (MS)
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From page 13... ...
They are terms that have cultural traction and can influence how people think about an offered cure, Caulfield said. "I call it ‘scienceploitation.' FIGURE 2-1 The tone of news media reports that covered stem cell therapies has been largely positive.
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From page 14... ...
The most common conditions being treated were optical disorders and blindness, paralysis, multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, and brain injuries or damage, Caulfield said. A separate analysis of the websites advertising stem cell treatments and the blogs of patients who receive treatments at these clinics also concluded that the clinics are primarily located in Asian countries, particularly China and India, but also found Central America and Caribbean countries to be major destinations, Petersen said (Levine and Wolf, 2012)
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From page 15... ...
Russia also has hundreds of unlicensed clinics that are offering stem cell treatments, and many of these clinics employ practitioners without medical qualifications, he said. In addition, some stem cell providers are offering treatments in developed countries by exploiting regulatory loopholes, Petersen said.
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From page 16... ...
Caulfield and his colleagues recently finished an analysis of more than 175 websites from scientific societies, stem cell research groups, and patient disease societies examining how they try to educate their communities about stem cell tourism (Master et al., 2013)
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