scientific american

When Google turns on you, you know you are in trouble

/ Kevin McCormack / 2 Comments

For years CIRM and others in the stem cell community (hello Paul Knoepfler) have been warning people about the dangers of going to clinics offering unproven and unapproved stem cell therapies. Recently the drum beat of people and organizations coming out in support of that stand has grown louder and louder. Mainstream media – TV and print – have run articles about these predatory clinics. And now, Google has joined those ranks, announcing it will restrict ads promoting these clinics.

“We regularly review and revise our advertising policies. Today, we’re announcing a new Healthcare and medicines policy to prohibit advertising for unproven or experimental medical techniques such as most stem cell therapy, cellular (non-stem) therapy, and gene therapy.”

Deepak Srivastava: Photo courtesy Gladstone Institutes

The president of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) Dr. Deepak Srivastava quickly issued a statement of support, saying:

“Google’s new policy banning advertising for speculative medicines is a much-needed and welcome step to curb the marketing of unscrupulous medical products such as unproven stem cell therapies. While stem cells have great potential to help us understand and treat a wide range of diseases, most stem cell interventions remain experimental and should only be offered to patients through well-regulated clinical trials. The premature marketing and commercialization of unproven stem cell products threatens public health, their confidence in biomedical research, and undermines the development of legitimate new therapies.”

Speaking of Deepak – we can use first names here because we are not only great admirers of him as a physician but also as a researcher, which is why we have funded some of his research – he has just published a wonderfully well written article criticizing these predatory clinics.

The article – in Scientific American – is titled “Don’t Believe Everything You Hear About Stem Cells” and rather than paraphrase his prose, I think it best if you read it yourself. So, here it is.

Enjoy.

Don’t Believe Everything You Hear about Stem Cells

The science is progressing rapidly,but bad actors have co-opted stem cells’ hope and promise by preying on unsuspecting patients and their families

Stem cell science is moving forward rapidly, with potential therapies to treat intractable human diseases on the horizon.Clinical trials are now underway to test the safety and effectiveness of stem cell–based treatments for blindness,spinal cord injury,heart disease,Parkinson’s disease, and more,some with early positive results.A sense of urgency drives the scientific community, and there is tremendous hope to finally cure diseases that, to date, have had no treatment.


But don’t believe everything you hear about stem cells. Advertisements and pseudo news articles promote stem cell treatments for everything from Alzheimer’s disease,autism and ALS, to cerebral palsy and other diseases.The claims simply aren’t true–they’re propagated by people wanting to make money off of a desperate and unsuspecting or unknowing public.Patients and their families can be misled by deceptive marketing from unqualified physicians who often don’t have appropriate medical credentials and offer no scientific evidence of their claims.In many cases, the cells being utilized are not even true stem cells.

Advertisements for stem cell treatments are showing up everywhere, with too-good-to-be-true claims and often a testimonial or two meant to suggest legitimacy or efficacy.Beware of the following:

    •       Claims that stem cell treatments can treat a wide range of diseases using a singular stem cell type. This is unlikely to be true.

    •       Claims that stem cells taken from one area of the body can be used to treat another, unrelated area of the body. This is also unlikely to be true.     •       Patient testimonials used to validate a particular treatment, with no scientific evidence. This is a red flag.

    •       Claims that evidence doesn’t yet exist because the clinic is running a patient-funded trial. This is a red flag; clinical trials rarely require payment for experimental treatment.

    •       Claims that the trial is listed on ClinicalTrials.gov and is therefore NIH-approved. This may not be true. The Web site is simply a listing; not all are legitimate trials.

    •       The bottom line: Does the treatment sound too good to be true? If so, it probably is. Look for concrete evidence that the treatment works and is safe.

Hundreds of clinics offer costly, unapproved and unproven stem cell interventions, and patients may suffer physical and financial harm as a result.A Multi-Pronged Approach to Deal with Bad Actors 

The International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR)has long been concerned that bad actors have co-opted the hope and promise of stem cell science to prey on unsuspecting patients and their families.

We read with sadness and disappointment the many stories of people trying unproven therapies and being harmed, including going blind from injections into the eyes or suffering from a spinal tumor after an injection of stem cells.Patients left financially strapped, with no physical improvement in their condition and no way to reclaim their losses, are an underreported and underappreciated aspect of these treatments.

Since late 2017, the Food and Drug Administration has stepped up its regulatory enforcement of stem cell therapies and provided a framework for regenerative medicine products that provides guidelines for work in this space.The agency has alerted many clinics and centers that they are not in compliance and has pledged to bring additional enforcement action if needed.

A Multi-Pronged Approach to Deal with Bad Actors  The International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) has long been concerned that bad actors have co-opted the hope and promise of stem cell science to prey on unsuspecting patients and their families.

We read with sadness and disappointment the many stories of people trying unproven therapies and being harmed, including going blind from injections into the eyesor suffering from a spinal tumor after an injection of stem cells.Patients left financially strapped, with no physical improvement in their condition and no way to reclaim their losses, are an underreported and underappreciated aspect of these treatments.

Since late 2017, the Food and Drug Administration has stepped up its regulatory enforcement of stem cell therapies and provided a framework for regenerative medicine products that provides guidelines for work in this space.The agency has alerted many clinics and centers that they are not in compliance and has pledged to bring additional enforcement action if needed.

In recent weeks, a federal judge granted the FDA a permanent injunction against U.S. Stem Cell, Inc. and U.S. Stem Cell Clinic, LLC for adulterating and misbranding its cellular products and operating outside of regulatory authority.We hope this will send a strong message to other clinics misleading patients with unapproved and potentially harmful cell-based products.

The Federal Trade Commission has also helped by identifying and curtailing unsubstantiated medical claims in advertising by several clinics. Late in 2018 the FTC won a $3.3-million judgment against two California-based clinics for deceptive health claims. The Federal Trade Commission has also helped by identifying and curtailing unsubstantiated medical claims in advertising by several clinics. Late in 2018 the FTC won a $3.3-million judgment against two California-based clinics for deceptive health claims.

These and other actions are needed to stem the tide of clinics offering unproved therapies and the people who manage and operate them.

Improving Public Awareness

We’re hopeful that the FDA will help improve public awareness of these issues and curb the abuses on ClinicalTrials.gov,a government-run Web site being misused by rogue clinics looking to legitimize their treatments. They list pay-to-participate clinical trials on the site, often without developing, registering or administering a real clinical trial.

The ISSCR Web site A Closer Look at Stem Cellsincludes patient-focused information about stem cells,with information written and vetted by stem cell scientists.The site includes how and where to report adverse events and false marketing claims by stem cell clinics.I encourage you to visit and learn about what is known and unknown about stem cells and their potential for biomedicine.The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

Stem cell stories that caught our eye: turning on T cells; fixing our brains; progress and trends in stem cells; and one young man’s journey to recover from a devastating injury

/ Kevin McCormack / Leave a comment

Healthy_Human_T_Cell

A healthy T cell

Here are some stem cell stories that caught our eye this past week. Some are groundbreaking science, others are of personal interest to us, and still others are just fun.

Directing the creation of T cells. To paraphrase the GOP Presidential nominee, any sane person LOVES, LOVES LOVES their T cells, in a HUGE way, so HUGE. They scamper around the body getting rid of viruses and the tiny cancers we all have in us all the time. A CIRM-funded team at CalTech has worked out the steps our genetic machinery must take to make more of them, a first step in letting physicians turn up the action of our immune systems.

We have known for some time the identity of the genetic switch that is the last, critical step in turning blood stem cells into T cells, but nothing in our body is as simple as a single on-off event. The Caltech team isolated four genetic factors in the path leading to that main switch and, somewhat unsuspected, they found out those four steps had to be activated sequentially, not all at the same time. They discovered the path by engineering mouse cells so that the main T cell switch, Bcl11b, glows under a microscope when it is turned on.

“We identify the contributions of four regulators of Bcl11b, which are all needed for its activation but carry out surprisingly different functions in enabling the gene to be turned on,” said Ellen Rothenberg, the senior author in a university press release picked up by Innovations Report. “It’s interesting–the gene still needs the full quorum of transcription factors, but we now find that it also needs them to work in the right order.”

Video primer on stem cells in the brain.  In conjunction with an article in its August issue, Scientific American posted a video from the Brain Forum in Switzerland of Elena Cattaneo of the University of Milan explaining the basics of adult versus pluripotent stem cells, and in particular how we are thinking about using them to repair diseases in the brain.

The 20-minute talk gives a brief review of pioneers who “stood alone in unmarked territory.” She asks how can stem cells be so powerful; and answers by saying they have lots of secrets and those secrets are what stem cell scientist like her are working to unravel.  She notes stem cells have never seen a brain, but if you show them a few factors they can become specialized nerves. After discussing collaborations in Europe to grow replacement dopamine neurons for Parkinson’s disease, she went on to describe her own effort to do the same thing in Huntington’s disease, but in this case create the striatal nerves lost in that disease.

The video closes with a discussion of how basic stem cell research can answer evolutionary questions, in particular how genetic changes allowed higher organisms to develop more complex nervous systems.

kelley and kent

CIRM Science Officers Kelly Shepard and Kent Fitzgerald

A stem cell review that hits close to home.  IEEE Pulse, a publication for scientists who mix engineering and medicine and biology, had one of their reporters interview two of our colleagues on CIRM’s science team. They asked senior science officers Kelly Shepard and Kent Fitzgerald to reflect on how the stem cell field has progressed based on their experience working to attract top researchers to apply for our grants and watching our panel of outside reviewers select the top 20 to 30 percent of each set of applicants.

One of the biggest changes has been a move from animal stem cell models to work with human stem cells, and because of CIRM’s dedicated and sustained funding through the voter initiative Proposition 71, California scientists have led the way in this change. Kelly described examples of how mouse and human systems are different and having data on human cells has been critical to moving toward therapies.

Kelly and Kent address several technology trends. They note how quickly stem cell scientists have wrapped their arms around the new trendy gene editing technology CRISPR and discuss ways it is being used in the field. They also discuss the important role of our recently developed ability to perform single cell analysis and other technologies like using vessels called exosomes that carry some of the same factors as stem cells without having to go through all the issues around transplanting whole cells.

“We’re really looking to move things from discovery to the clinic. CIRM has laid the foundation by establishing a good understanding of mechanistic biology and how stem cells work and is now taking the knowledge and applying it for the benefit of patients,” Kent said toward the end of the interview.

jake and family

Jake Javier and his family

Jake’s story: one young man’s journey to and through a stem cell transplant; As a former TV writer and producer I tend to be quite critical about the way TV news typically covers medical stories. But a recent story on KTVU, the Fox News affiliate here in the San Francisco Bay Area, showed how these stories can be done in a way that balances hope, and accuracy.

Reporter Julie Haener followed the story of Jake Javier – we have blogged about Jake before – a young man who broke his spine and was then given a stem cell transplant as part of the Asterias Biotherapeutics clinical trial that CIRM is funding.

It’s a touching story that highlights the difficulty treating these injuries, but also the hope that stem cell therapies holds out for people like Jake, and of course for his family too.

If you want to see how a TV story can be done well, this is a great example.

Our Tainted Food Supply: Its Lasting Effects on Stem Cells May Explain Declines in Sperm Counts

/ Todd Dubnicoff / Leave a comment

Spermatozoons, floating to ovuleIn the science fiction film, Children of Men, humans in the year 2027 face extinction due to decades of infertility. This premise doesn’t seem all that far-fetched when you consider studies in the U.S., Japan, and Europe over the past two decades that point to declining sperm counts. A 2013 study, for instance, that followed 26,000 French men for 17 years reported a 32% drop in sperm counts. And a study of 5000 Danish men with a median age of 19 found 40% had sperm counts corresponding to infertility or decreased fertility.

So what’s going on here? One line of evidence blames exposure to chemicals that leach into our food and water supply. A possible culprit is the much-despised Bisphenol-A, or BPA, a man-made chemical found in plastic bottles, the inner linings of canned food and even receipt paper used at your local grocery store. BPA is known as a hormone disruptor because it interferes with normal hormone activity in the body by mimicking the female hormone estrogen. Lab animals exposed to low levels of BPA have shown increased incidence of certain cancers, neurological problems, diabetes, obesity, female reproduction problems and, yes, decreased sperm counts.

BPA_shutterstock_243369064Data published last week in PLOS Genetics appears to have pinpointed the link between BPA and decreased sperm counts: stem cells. Specifically the so-called spermatogonial stem cells that give rise to sperm. In the Washington State University study, the research team gave newborn male mice daily oral doses of BPA for about two weeks. The chemical exposure negatively affected this spermatogonial stem cell population by disrupting the processing of the cells’ DNA and, in turn, the development of fully mature sperm. The team got similar results replacing BPA with synthetic estrogen found in birth control pills. This form of estrogen is also known to contaminate our water supply even after sewage treatment.

A surprising and even scary twist to these results is that the brief exposure of BPA or estrogen in the newborn male mice permanently changed their stem cells. The team confirmed this observation by transplanting the spermatogonial stem cells from BPA-exposed mice into the testes of mice that never received BPA. In this case, these mice still exhibited reduced sperm production. As senior author Nancy Hunt points out in an interview with Scientific American, the exposure to these chemicals:

“is not simply affecting sperm being produced now, but impacting the stem cell population, and that will affect sperm produced throughout the lifetime.”

It’s remains debatable whether the detectable BPA or estrogen levels in our food and water supply is high enough to actually cause health problems in humans. In 2013 the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) downplayed possible worries on its website:

“Is BPA safe? Yes. Based on FDA’s ongoing safety review of scientific evidence, the available information continues to support the safety of BPA for the currently approved uses in food containers and packaging.”

Still, this recent study and others like it certainly warrant further investigation. University of Missouri scientist Frederick vom Saal, who was not part of the study, put it this way in his interview with Scientific American:

“It’s important in future studies to see if the stem cell changes from exposure are passed to future generations… Since most people are consistently exposed to BPA and other estrogenic compounds, each generation could have it a bit worse.”