Fact check

Fact-check: F grade for irresponsible stem cell COVID-19 cure piece

March 1, 2021 / By / 4 Comments
vitro biopharma stem cells covid 19

At times there’s been seriously bad journalism covering COVID-19 itself including implications of various things being a COVID cure. Of course, media coverage of stem cell research itself sometimes ends up being a train-wreck of hype too. More recently we’ve seen irresponsible journalism also around the specific idea of stem cells for COVID-19, but sometimes …

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Head transplant update: fact check & perspectives

February 10, 2022 / By / 5 Comments
sergio canavero perhaps the leading advocate of head transplant technology

Is a head transplant actually going to be an option for extending life or changing what it means to be human? What about brain transplants? Let’s lump head and brain transplants together. Any possibility of this happening in coming decades? How close are we to that reality in 2022? In today’s post I give an …

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More Duke Autism Center backstory: stem cell ‘magic’ & money

August 26, 2022 / By / Leave a Comment
Duke-Curemark-autism-study-pamphlet

Last week I wrote a long post detailing the troubling multimillion-dollar reverberations between the Duke Autism Center and a for-profit stem cell clinic. The clinic in Panama is The Stem Cell Institute. The potential entanglements raise a bunch of questions and concerns. They center on questionable, unproven autism “treatments”. In Duke’s case, their own clinical …

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R3 Stem Cell still raises red flags for me after FDA letter including do one-get one meeting

May 23, 2022 / By / 4 Comments
R3-Stem-Cell-Course

Back in May, the FDA cautioned a stem cell clinic firm called R3 Stem Cell and its leader David Greene about what they were doing. Importantly, the agency indicated that some of R3’s stem cells may be unapproved drug products. FDA and R3 Stem Cell While the FDA didn’t send R3 Stem Cell a formal warning …

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What is stromal vascular fraction or SVF?

June 11, 2022 / By / 26 Comments
SVF2

When people discuss “fat stem cells” they usually mean something called “stromal vascular fraction” or SVF. While references to fat or adipose stem cells can sometimes mean non-SVF materials, these days adipose SVF gets the most attention. But, does anyone have a clear picture of this biologic? Fortunately, it’s starting to come more into focus …

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Dissecting Liveyon FDA inspection report & troubled perinatal stem cell industry

June 8, 2022 / By / 1 Comment
Liveyon

The perinatal stem cell clinic supplier Liveyon has had many issues recently including an FDA inspection that  in my view didn’t go well and which I’ll return to in a minute. First, some background on the company and this troubled industry. E. coli and other pathogens ended up in some of the Liveyon product somehow …

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Sales of ‘zombie’, birth-related ‘stem cells’ continue to mushroom

June 8, 2022 / By / 15 Comments
zombie-stem

The birth-related stem cell clinic industry is a serious problem for patients, the stem cell field, and the FDA as the clinics sell more and more of what I think of as “zombie” injections. One of the biggest changes in the last 2 years in the unproven stem cell clinic arena was predicted by the …

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Stem cell therapy reviews: knees, lung, autism, & Regenexx

June 6, 2022 / By / 20 Comments
stem-cell-therapy-reviews

Who decides whether a stem cell therapy is “good” or “bad”, and should that kind of a judgment be more focused on direct patient perspectives such as their stem cell therapy reviews as consumers or based on biomedical science? Both? I’ve written before about how stem cell patients are increasingly thinking of themselves as consumers …

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