Search Results for: compassionate use

8 simple reasons not to get an unlicensed stem cell treatment part 2: lack of follow-up

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I’m doing a series of posts on straightforward reasons why patients should not get unlicensed stem cell treatments. Part 1 of the series was on the risk of losing medical insurance coverage. Today is part 2, which is focused on a serious failing of many for-profit, point-of-care stem cell clinics selling unlicensed treatments: lack of […]

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Money and stem cell ‘miracles’: Pluristem questioned on ethics

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Pluristem Therapeutics Inc. is a publicly traded (NASDAQ) biotech Israeli company that is developing stem cell treatments based on the use of expanded placental stem cells called PLX cells. The Pluristem PLX drug is not approved for treating patients at this time in any country, however Pluristem has treated a handful of patients via something

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Given their legal conflict, will Cryo-Cell & Duke still turn to donor units for kids with CP?

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Duke Cryo-Cell therapeutic misconception

The Parent’s Guide to Cord Blood Foundation recently announced that Cryo-Cell and its long-time partner, a Duke pediatric cell therapy team, have made a key change. They will begin offering infusions of unrelated, unproven cord blood to pediatric patients with cerebral palsy (CP). These are called donor infusions. Up until now, they had mainly focused

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Mostly discouraging trial of MSC-NPs or purported neural cells from MSCs for MS

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MSCs for MS, MSC-NPs

The idea of mesenchymal cells or MSCs for MS has been around for a long time. However, there haven’t been that many strong clinical trials testing it. There’s a new paper out that reports one of the stronger MSC-related trials for MS in terms of design. In this case, they didn’t use just MSCs but

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Upcoming Right-To-Try debate: NYU’s Roxland and Goldwater’s Sandefur

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Right-To-Try-Debate-Roxland-Sandefur

Should patients have the Right To Try experimental therapies that could be unsafe and ineffective? What if those patients have a terminal illness and no reasonable prospects of being helpful to conventional medicine? Doesn’t it make perfect sense to let them try a risky approach if they want to do so? On the other hand,

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Reviews of my new book GMO Sapiens on #CRISPR & human modification

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GMO-Sapiens-Book-Cover

It’s exciting that the reviews are starting to come in on my new book, GMO Sapiens, on human genetic modification including CRISPR. Here is one from The Scientist and the book was recommended by Scientific American. Reviews from individual authors and scientists are below. “GMO Sapiens could not be more timely. New technologies like CRISPR-Cas9 gene

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STAP News From Harvard? Vacanti Stepping Down as Chair & Going on Sabbatical

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Obokata_Vacanti

What’s the deal with Brigham and Women’s Hospital or Harvard Medical School, where STAP cell senior author works, when it comes to the retracted STAP cell papers? I was just writing yesterday in part about how we haven’t really heard anything (news, statements, etc.) from those places about the whole STAP cell mess. In contrast, in Japan

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