Study sounds alarm over rise of clinics offering stem cell therapies

Study sounds alarm over rise of clinics offering stem cell therapies

Hundreds of clinics are marketing stem cell therapies directly to consumers in the United States, despite lacking federal approval and in many cases even a shred of scientific evidence that their treatments work, according to a UC Davis study published Thursday.

The proliferation of stem cell operations suggests that the so-called stem cell tourism trade — the global market for largely untested therapies — has come home, said Paul Knoepfler, a UC Davis stem cell scientist and co-author of the paper.

The paper, published in the journal Cell Stem Cell, identified 570 clinics that offered stem cell therapies that promised to treat dozens of different conditions.

Clinics suggest that stem cells taken from a patient’s own fat, for example, can treat everything from heart disease and diabetes to urinary incontinence and sexual disfunction.

The most troubling promotions are those targeting people with sick children, including clinics that promise treatments for autism or cerebral palsy, Knoepfler said.

In theory, they could be used to replace dead or damaged tissue in the brain, heart or bones — to treat heart disease, dementia, bone loss and paralysis.

Recent advances have found ways to isolate stem cells from just about any tissue in the human body, concentrate it in large doses, and inject it back into a person.

The vast majority of the clinics that Knoepfler and Turner identified in their paper are promoting these types of treatments, where a person’s own stem cells — usually taken from fat tissue or bone marrow — are concentrated and injected back into his or her body.

If patients start having bad side effects, or losing faith that stem cells can actually improve their health, they may abandon what is a truly promising field of medicine, said Dr. Arnold Kriegstein, head of UCSF’s stem cell program.

At The Stone Clinic, a San Francisco operation that was one of the 570 identified by the new paper, doctors said they, too, are wary of over-promoting stem cell therapies.

Dr. Kevin Stone, an orthopedic surgeon who works mostly with people who have suffered joint damage, said he’s dipped into studying the use of stem cells — taken from the bone marrow of patients — to encourage tissue recovery.

Specifically, some scientists and patient advocates argue that current FDA policy hinders stem cell research by making the approval process unnecessarily lengthy and expensive.