There appears to be a big, risky loophole in the relatively new national Right To Try law. Some folks apparently anticipated this problem long ago, but I think most of us weren’t aware of it. Update: More specifically, some law and policy experts were writing about this and other potential loopholes in 2018. I recommend this piece from Beth Roxland and Elisa A. Hurley on the The PRIM&R blog. What’s the deal? It seems to be a case of what I would call piggybacking …Read More
John Rasko
The 60 Minutes show here in the U.S. has done sobering segments over the years on risky, unproven stem cell clinics, but now there is a new episode of 60 Minutes Australia that is the polar opposite: it mostly made a mess of things with its fluffy coverage of the story of a wonderful little girl with cerebral palsy receiving an unproven stem cell transplant at a clinic in Mexico. The new show segment, which you can watch in two parts (see below) on …Read More
There are now so many clinics selling non-FDA approved stem cell offerings across the U.S. that tens or hundreds of thousands of patients are at risk. How did we get here? What if we had a way of understanding how stem cell clinics spread across the U.S. in the first place? For example, an animated map showing the spread of stem cell clinics selling non-FDA approved “treatments” across the U.S. would be useful. With publication of our new paper, the recent work of Leigh Turner …Read More
Last week a team led by John Rasko of the University of Sydney published a very important stem cell clinic study also in Cell Stem Cell. Thus, there have now been two new reports on the state of the stem cell clinic industry both here in the U.S. and more globally. Leigh Turner and I published our paper at the end of June on the American clinic industry, finding 351 businesses and 570 clinics selling non-FDA approved stem cell therapies. Rasko and colleagues did a much …Read More