For a miracle, more turn to stem cells

Maggie Alejos arrived here in June from St. Anne, Ill., with her husband, her daughter and a cashiers check for $13,500, payable to the Regenerative Medicine Institute.Rail-thin, with an oxygen tube anchored above her upper lip, Alejos, a retired Army nurse, has coped with emphysema for a dozen of her 65 years.

Once she came close enough to a lung transplant that doctors prepared her for surgery, only to discover that the donor lung was unfit. At a hospital here, doctors affiliated with the institute extracted about seven ounces of fat from her thighs, hoping to harvest about 130 million stem cells and implant them in her failing lungs.

Across the Internet where Alejos learned about the Tijuana institute adult stem cells are promoted as a cure for everything from sagging skin to severed spinal cords.

On the surface, the claim is plausible. Scientists have discovered that fat, bone marrow and other parts of the body contain stem cells, immature cells that can rejuvenate themselves, at least in the tissue they are naturally found.

But it has yet to be proved that these cells can regenerate no matter where they are placed, or under what conditions this might occur. Moreover, questions about safety remain unanswered.

These sober realities do not appear to have slowed the rise of an international industry catering to customers who may pay tens of thousands of dollars in cash for their shot at a personal miracle. (Some foreign operators offer creative variations on the theme, like cells from sharks and sheep.)

Domestic providers, too, can push the limits. In July, for example, a former pathologist at the Medical University of South Carolina pleaded guilty to illegally processing and shipping stem cells for treatment without approval from the university or the Food and Drug Administration.

The number of clinics and products has reached the point that scientists fear repercussions for their own work. Dr. Hesham Sadek of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, who is studying heart muscle regeneration, worries that the marketing deluge now makes it hard for patients to tell science from swindle, and all that lies on the spectrum in between.

It really has the potential to undermine the legitimacy of the whole field, he said.

Even though Tijuana has perhaps 20 clinics offering adult stem cell therapy, Dr. Javier Lopez, founder of the Regenerative Medicine Institute, says it is his that has become the poster company to knock down.

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For a miracle, more turn to stem cells