Does Medicare cover stem cell therapy? Readers of The Niche have regularly asked this question. They’re curious about insurance coverage too. The answer is “no” in almost every case, with some notable exceptions I’ll get to at the end of the post. Still, clinics appear to have already been charging Medicare for what collectively adds […]
The National Academy of Medicine elected a cohort of new members including three stem cell researchers. It’s great to see our field and these great scientists get recognition. The new NAM stem cell researchers include Sally Temple, Connie Eaves, and Tippie MacKenzie. Here’s a little bit about each of them. Dr. Temple is a stem cell biologist
Weekly reads: NAM dubs 3 stem cell researchers, kick the 2 buckets, stem cell homing Read More »
A common question I hear from readers of The Niche is some version of, “Is stem cell therapy covered by insurance?” Sometimes they also ask about Medicare coverage. To be clear, I’m talking about unproven stem cell “therapies” here. The type clinics sell. It’s not FDA approved so generally insurance companies and Medicare will not
Is unproven stem cell therapy covered by insurance? Read More »
Cloning is one of those topics that both fascinates and kind of scares people, especially the idea of duplicating people. I regularly cover the topic here on The Niche because stem cell technologies are involved. Also, one form of the process sometimes called “therapeutic cloning” involves embryonic stem cells. Duplicating mammals has now long been
Weekly reads: freeze-dried cloning, FDA signals, stem cell escapees Read More »
Stem cell reviews of clinics and unproven therapies are an important relatively new part of The Niche. Data point to thousands of stem cell clinics in the U.S. selling a wide variety of supposed cell therapies. How does one evaluate such clinics? This question is on my mind regularly as so many patients ask me
Stem cell reviews: clinics, therapies, & dubious ideas Read More »
The world of stem cell research and regenerative medicine is unpredictable but it’s fun to be a part of it and try to do predictions. Each year in late December or early January I make prognostications for the coming year for stem cell research and regenerative medicine. I made 21 such predictions for the current
Grading my 21 stem cell & regenerative medicine predictions for 2021 Read More »
If you celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday I hope you had a nice one and, right before it started a new article popped on the scene about the CRISPR babies. Before we discuss those three gene-edited people, who are now growing up into little kids, we hit a milestone on our YouTube Stem Cell Channel with
Regenerative reads: 3 CRISPR babies, FDA warning, diabetes, pubs Read More »
One of the core problems in the world of unproven stem cell clinics is something called therapeutic misconception. I’ll talk more about that in a minute, but first, let me tell you what brought this to mind now. Surprisingly, the story starts at Duke University. A Duke cell therapy team and the biotech Cryo-Cell have big
Therapeutic misconception & the planned Duke Cryo-Cell cord clinic Read More »
A few years ago a promotional website called Bioinformant popped up in the stem cell arena. It’s very different in some ways than most other stem cell-related websites that I’ve seen. It’s a marketing and promotion site. What’s the backstory? I believe there’s reason for concern here specifically related to Bioinformant promoting unproven stem cell
Review of Bioinformant, unproven stem cell clinic promotion, NIH & Pfizer as clients? Read More »
One of the most common questions I’ve gotten over the last decade is, “how much does stem cell therapy cost?” They actually seem most often to want to know more specifically how much it should cost. To try to authoritatively answer this now in 2023 we need data from the present and past along with expert
How much does stem cell therapy cost in 2023? Read More »