A growing number of dubious clinics are offering stem-cell treatments for everything from Parkinson’s disease to diabetes
Stem-cell industry professionals are calling on the World Health Organisation to lay down some ground rules for the industry, to protect vulnerable patients from “shonky clinics”.
A growing number of clinics, including ones in Australia, are offering stem-cell treatments for everything from Parkinson’s disease to diabetes and infertility.
Associate Professor Megan Munsie, deputy director of the Centre for Stem Cell Systems at Stem Cells Australia, and her colleagues, are calling for a crackdown on unscrupulous advertising to protect patients, and to protect the industry from an expected backlash.
“The websites are high on rhetoric of science – often using various accreditation, awards and other tokens to imply legitimacy – but low on proof that they work,” she wrote in the Conversation.
“Rather than producing independently verified results, these clinics rely on patient testimonials or unsubstantiated claims of “improvement”,” she said. “In so doing these shonky clinics understate the risks to patient health associated with these unproven stem cell-based interventions.”
This was at odds with proven stem-cell treatments, such as skin grafts for severe burns, which had been extensively studied in clinical trials.
Commenting on an article in Science Translational Medicine that she recently co-authored with Professor Munsie, Dr Sarah Chan, a chancellor’s fellow at the University of Edinburgh, said that “many patients feel that potential cures are being held back by red tape and lengthy approval processes”.
“Stem-cell therapies hold a lot of promise, but we need rigorous clinical trials and regulatory processes to determine whether a proposed treatment is safe, effective and better than existing treatments.”
