Stem Cell Clinic

Stem cell warning: experts fear experimental treatments will lead to serious injury

Patients who undergo experimental stem cell treatments run the risk of serious injury, Australian experts have warned.

A team of leading stem cell scientists say the treatments, which involve injecting patients with stem cells from their own fat deposits, have become available to Australian consumers without the protection of regulation or evidence of benefits.

Stem Cells Australia, a consortium of medical and scientific researchers from eight leading Australian universities and research institutes, raised concerns after it became clear the treatments, which are popular overseas, had spread to Australia.

They say vulnerable people with degenerative conditions, such as multiple sclerosis (MS) and Parkinson's disease, are being misled into paying up to $9,000 on stem cell therapies with little or no evidence of the benefits.

However, the industry says there is some good evidence available and treatments are safe as long as patients are only injected with their own unaltered cells.

Practising doctors are forming an industry group to write a code of conduct to keep patients safe.

In a submission to the National Health and Medical Research Council, Stem Cells Australia says many of the practices used by overseas doctors are now being witnessed among Australian practitioners.

These include direct-to-consumer marketing, using patient testimonials instead of evidence, offering the same treatments for unrelated illnesses, lack of safety evidence, no results in peer-reviewed journals, and hefty fees.

Program leader Professor Martin Pera says stem cell treatments are falling through a regulatory loophole because patients are treated with their own cells.

"What's going on is a large scale human experiment without proper scientific procedure and without proper regulatory oversight," he said.

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Stem cell warning: experts fear experimental treatments will lead to serious injury

New treatment eases pet pain

DANIEL TOBIN/ Fairfax NZ

STEMMING PAIN: Lord Claude the st bernard was the first Christchurch dog to receive new stem cell treatment at Total Vets. Kirsten Wylie and Thea Sweeney inject stem cells to ease osteoarthritis in his hips and knees.

Christchurch pet owners have a new way to splash out on their pet care, with the arrival of stem cell treatment costing $2500.

The method uses stem cells from the animal's fat to inject into arthritic joints to relieve pain and limit the need for anti-inflammatories.

Tauranga veterinarian Gil Sinclair started using the technique in his clinic after learning about it in Australia, and has travelled the country helping other clinics set up laboratories.

On Tuesday, Sinclair was in Christchurch to help local clinic Total Vet with its first two patients, a kunekune pig named Samantha and a 78kg st bernard called Lord Claude.

Both animals suffer chronic osteoarthritis, and their respective owners made the leap in the hope of providing pain relief and greater joint use.

Total Vet owner Kirsten Wylie had been keen to get the new treatment in her clinic and approached Lord Claude's owners with the proposal to provide longer-term relief for his arthritis and hip dysplasia.

Stem cells were present throughout all body tissues, but were in particularly high concentration in bone marrow. Using bone marrow was difficult and time-consuming, as extractions had to be cultivated in a laboratory for several weeks to get enough to be useful.

The technique that Sinclair used could be completed in a day. In the morning the animal was brought in and blood and fat samples taken. Only a "heaped tablespoon" of fat was taken, and the stem cells removed and concentrated. Platelets from blood had high levels of naturally occurring stem cell activators, so these were added to the dormant stem cells to "wake" them up.

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New treatment eases pet pain

365 days: 2013 in review

Shutdowns, lethal viruses, typhoons and meteorites much of this years science news seemed to come straight from the set of a Hollywood disaster movie. But there were plenty of feel-good moments, too. Space exploration hit a new high, cash poured in to investigate that most cryptic of human organs, the brain, and huge leaps were made in stem-cell therapies and the treatment of HIV. Here, captured in soundbites, statistics and summaries, is everything you need to know about the science that mattered in 2013.

LUX: Carlos H. Faham

The Large Underground Xenon dark-matter experiment, deep in a mine in South Dakota.

One of the years most important cosmological results was an experimental no-show. The Large Underground Xenon (LUX, pictured) experiment at Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, South Dakota 370 kilograms of liquid xenon almost 1.5kilometres down in a gold mine did not see any particles of elusive dark matter flying through Earth. But it put the tightest constraints yet on the mass of dark-matter particles, and their propensity to interact with visible matter. Theoretical physicist Matthew Strassler at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey, says a consensus is forming that hints of dark matter seen by earlier experiments in the past three years were probably just statistical fluctuations.

PlancK: ESA/Planck Collaboration

Whatever dark matter is, it makes up around 84% of the Universes total matter, according to observations, released in March, of the Universes cosmic microwave background (CMB) by the European Space Agencys Planck satellite. Plancks image (pictured) also strongly supports the hypothesis of inflation, in which the Universe is thought to have expanded rapidly after the Big Bang. A better probe of inflation might be provided through its predicted influence on how the polarization of CMB photons varies across the sky (B-mode polarization). That subtle signal has not been measured yet, but astronomers hopes were raised by news of the first sighting of a related polarization signal, by the South Pole Telescope, in July. And another Antarctic telescope the underground IceCube observatory confirmed this year that the high-energy neutrinos it has detected come from far away in the cosmos, hinting at a new world of neutrino astronomy.

Jae C. Hong/AP

US workers came out in force against the shutdown.

The slow decline of US federal support for research and development spending is already down 16.3% since 2010 reached a new nadir in October, when political brinkmanship led the government to shut down for 16 days. Grant money stopped flowing; work halted at major telescopes, US Antarctic bases and most federal laboratories; and key databases maintained by the government went offline. Many government researchers were declared non-essential and barred by law from visiting their offices and laboratories, or even checking their official e-mail accounts. Since the shutdowns end, grant backlogs and missed deadlines have scrambled agency workloads.

Away from the deadlock in the United States, the European Union negotiated a path to a 201420 research budget of almost 80billion (US$110billion), a 27% rise in real terms over the previous 200713 period. And funding in South Korea, China, Germany and Japan continued to increase (the United Kingdom and France saw little change). But Japans largesse came with the clear understanding that its science investment would bring fast commercial pay-offs. Along similar lines, US Republican politicians are calling for the National Science Foundation to justify every grant it awards as being in the national interest.

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365 days: 2013 in review

Will stem cell therapy help cure spinal cord injury?

Dec. 17, 2013 A systematic survey of the scientific literature shows that stem cell therapy can have a statistically significant impact on animal models of spinal cord injury, and points the way for future studies.

Spinal cord injuries are mostly caused by trauma, often incurred in road traffic or sporting incidents, often with devastating and irreversible consequences, and unfortunately having a relatively high prevalence (250,000 patients in the USA; 80% of cases are male). High-profile campaigners like the late actor Christopher Reeve, himself a victim of sports-related spinal cord injury, have placed high hopes in stem cell transplantation. But how likely is it to work?

This question is addressed in a paper published 17th December in the open access journal PLOS Biology by Ana Antonic, David Howells and colleagues from the Florey Institute and the University of Melbourne, Australia, and Malcolm MacLeod and colleagues from the University of Edinburgh, UK.

Stem cell therapy aims to use special regenerative cells (stem cells) to repopulate areas of damage that result from spinal cord injuries, with the hope of improving the ability to move ("motor outcomes") and to feel ("sensory outcomes") beyond the site of the injury. Many studies have been performed that involve animal models of spinal cord injury (mostly rats and mice), but these are limited in scale by financial, practical and ethical considerations. These limitations hamper each individual study's statistical power to detect the true effects of the stem cell implantation.

This new study gets round this problem by conducting a "meta-analysis" -- a sophisticated and systematic cumulative statistical reappraisal of many previous laboratory experiments. In this case the authors assessed 156 published studies that examined the effects of stem cell treatment for experimental spinal injury in a total of about 6000 animals.

Overall, they found that stem cell treatment results in an average improvement of about 25% over the post-injury performance in both sensory and motor outcomes, though the results can vary widely between animals. For sensory outcomes the degree of improvement tended to increase with the number of cells introduced -- scientists are often reassured by this sort of "dose response," as it suggests a real underlying biologically plausible effect.

The authors went on to use their analysis to explore the effects of bias (whether the experimenters knew which animals were treated and which untreated), the way that the stem cells were cultured, the way that the spinal injury was generated, and the way that outcomes were measured. In each case, important lessons were learned that should help inform and refine the design of future animal studies. The meta-analysis also revealed some surprises that should provoke further investigation -- there was little evidence of any beneficial sensory effects in female animals, for example, and it didn't seem to matter whether immunosuppressive drugs were administered or not.

The authors conclude: "Extensive recent preclinical literature suggests that stem cell-based therapies may offer promise; however the impact of compromised internal validity and publication bias means that efficacy is likely to be somewhat lower than reported here."

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Will stem cell therapy help cure spinal cord injury?

Foetal stem cell treatment sees success in fighting brittle bone disease

SINGAPORE: A team of experts from Singapore's National University Hospital (NUH) has made a clinical breakthrough in their work on foetal stem cell treatment.

The team is part of an international collaboration comprising researches from Karolinska Institutet, Sweden, and Taiwan.

The treatment involves the injection of stem cells into a foetus while still in the mother's womb to treat various abnormalities and genetic disorders.

The experts announced this after successfully treating two girls with brittle bone disease. One of them is a four year-old who was treated in Singapore.

The team plans to carry out further research on the use of stem cell treatment for other prenatal abnormalities.

Dr Citra Mattar, associate consultant from the Department of Obstetrics & Gynaecology at NUH, said: "Treating a foetus that's only 12 grams or 20 grams in the early part of pregnancy is likely to be much more effective when we give a certain dose of stem cell or gene therapy product; compared to treating a baby -- when it's born it's 2.5 kg, it's much bigger than the foetus. So we can use a smaller amount of product to achieve a greater result."

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Foetal stem cell treatment sees success in fighting brittle bone disease