The Real Stem Cells of Beverly Hills?

They say a picture is worth a thousand words and with stem cell clinics and GoogleMaps, maybe it’s true.

When Leigh Turner and I published our stem cell clinic paper in Cell Stem Cell last year, Beverly Hills stood out as a top hot spot for these businesses selling non-FDA approved stem cells.

See the GoogleMap image from a search today above with the search terms, “Stem cells Beverly Hills”. According to GoogleMaps, just drive down Wilshire Boulevard through Beverly Hills and you could sample many of the stem cell businesses, some of which are just blocks from one another.

It’s like the stem cell direct-to-consumer epicenter of the universe.  

I’m not saying that everything or everyone listed in this map from GoogleMaps is a stem cell clinic, but many are. I recognize almost all of these entities, but I don’t recall Jian N. Ye as a stem cell provider.

There are so many entities on this map that Google couldn’t fit the names of all of them in there. There are also some others off the edge of this particular map but nearby.

We could have a stem cell crawl Beverly Hills style?

You could have a bite at the fancy restaurant Spago with wine, then visit a dozen stem cell businesses and maybe still have time to go shopping on Rodeo Drive too…of course for all of these things you’d need big bucks. But you can easily drop way more at a stem cell business than at the expensive restaurants or clothing stores in Beverly Hills.

If there’s a Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, why not a Real Stem Cells of Beverly Hills, right?

But are the stem cells in Beverly Hills “real” in the sense of having real promise based on actual properly controlled data including pre-clinical data that demonstrates they might be safe and effective?