Hi everyone, St. Baldrick’s is the top children’s cancer foundation and does amazing work for kids with cancer and their families. Their top fundraising event is a head-shaving program where people make pledges in support of a “shavee” who gets their head shaved in solidarity with kids with cancer who often lose their hair due …
How baldness can cure kid’s cancer: find out & please help! Read More »
How do dubious stem cell clinics get patients in the door to make money? In part they do this via the Internet via the clinics’ own websites. There are also patient websites, some secret, which may serve ad recruitment tools for specific clinics. A more general tactic may be the use of so-called “recruiter-patients”. There …
Recruiter-patients: how common & corrupt is this practice at US stem cell clinics? Read More »
Two women in San Diego County are heading to jail after being convicted and sentenced for fraud related to stem cell treatments.The women injected concoctions of bovine stem cells from Germany and DMSO into patients. You can read the details of the original arrest here on the FBI website. According to a Modesto Bee article, Kathleen …
A concerning trend in the for-profit stem cell field, but one that does not get enough attention, is self-experimentation by those selling (often unlicensed) stem cell treatments. In other words, the stem cell clinic leaders and docs often not only sell stem cell treatments to patients, but also they give themselves the same treatments, often repeatedly. …
The dangers of stem cell self-experimentation: cartoon & discussion Read More »
The mesenchymal stem cell (MSC). So important and yet so misunderstood? People pronounce it in different ways. People isolate the MSCs in different ways. Each person’s MSCs are very different. Each lab’s MSCs are different. (see picture above of MSCs showing fibroblastic morphology; source is Wikipedia) Someone once told me that MSCs are the same …
Would an MSC by any other name still smell as sweet? Read More »
I’ve been running a poll on what is the ideal background for the CEO of a stem cell company. We got a pretty good turnout in this poll, although one is to be reminded that Internet polls are not scientific. It’s not perfect, but the results (at right) seem quite interesting. So far, the MBA …
I really appreciate how insightful the students are with whom I interact each year including undergrads, grads, and medical students. One asked me the other day “What are the backgrounds of the CEOs of stem cell companies?” I know some of the CEOs and their background, but the question got me thinking, what is the …
What is the ideal background for a stem cell company CEO? Take our poll Read More »
Over the last few weeks, I have enjoyed talking with and interviewing Dr. Allan Wu, of The Morrow Institute on stem cell cosmetic procedures. I was impressed greatly by his talk at the World Stem Cell Summit last year. Dr. Wu is a fellowship trained Surgical Molecular Biologist with a background in Molecular Embryology and a board …
Interview with Regenerative Surgeon, Dr. Allan Wu Read More »
It is always exciting when a biomedical technology as revolutionary as iPS cells is on the cusp of being used in patients for the first time. In the last few days stories have reported about how a proposed clinical trial based on iPS cells has completed several regulatory steps and is closer to starting. This …