Beware Stem Cell Clinics that Offer Untested Treatments

BY HARRIET HALL, M.D.

STEM CELL TREATMENTS ARE ALL THE RAGE. Since they’re mostly illegal in the U.S., patients have been going to other countries for treatment (stem cell tourism). The claims are grandiose, but the evidence to support those claims is thin gruel.

What are Stem Cells?

Embryonic stem cells are the cells in the early embryo that develop into all the different types of cells needed to make a baby. The idea behind stem cell therapy is “Hey, let’s harness that. If stem cells can grow a whole baby, we ought to be able to use them to fix anything that goes wrong. They could replace cells or entire organs anywhere in the body that have been harmed by disease or injury.” It is a seemingly simple idea, but it is not so easy to implement. For stem cells to be useful, we would have to figure out how to get them to where they are needed, control their differentiation to produce the type of cells we want, and make sure they don’t go elsewhere and create problems or develop into malignant tumors.

Research on embryonic stem cells was hampered by public objections and government restrictions. But that didn’t matter so much, because researchers soon learned that they could harvest stem cells from adults. Adult stem cells are found throughout the body. They have a repair function in the organs where they are found. To some extent, they can be artificially induced to behave more like embryonic stem cells, with the potential to develop into types of cells other than just the cells of the organ where they were found.