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Unproven Stem Cell Treatments Blind 3 Women (npr.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Scientists have long hoped that stem cells might have the power to treat diseases. But it's always been clear that they could be dangerous too, especially if they're not used carefully. Now a pair of papers published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine is underscoring both the promise and the peril of using stem cells for therapy. In one report, researchers document the cases of three elderly women who were blinded after getting stem cells derived from fat tissue at a for-profit clinic in Florida. The treatment was marketed as a treatment for macular degeneration, the most common cause of blindness among the elderly. Each woman got cells injected into both eyes. In a second report, a patient suffering from the same condition had a halt in the inexorable loss of vision patients usually experience, which may or may not have been related to the treatment. That patient got a different kind of stem cell derived from skin cells as part of a carefully designed Japanese study. The Japanese case marks the first time anyone has given induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells to a patient to treat any condition. The report about the three women in their 70s and 80s who were blinded in Florida is renewing calls for the Food and Drug Administration to crack down on the hundreds of clinics that are selling unproven stem cell treatments for a wide variety of medical conditions, including arthritis, autism and stroke.
Technological salvation is a faith based proposition.
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
Pro tip, don't look at laser err have injections in the remaining eye.
One at a time it people!
Always do experimental treatments on one eye. And only when you're sure that vision in that eye has stabilized (whether improved, the same, or worse) do you treat the other eye. This is how laser eye surgery (and its predecessor - radial keratotomy which made incisions in the cornea with a knife) was done before it established a statistical track record of being very safe and reliable. Even then, in extreme or risky cases they'll still do one eye at a time.
Treating both eyes at once with an experimental procedure was beyond reckless and negligent. The idiots who decided to do it need to lose their medical licenses and face criminal charges.
It's going to get crazier.
The summary misses an important part of this story: Congress passed a law mandating the that federal government operate a registry of clinical trials for compassionate reasons. Then unscrupulous companies discovered this was a perfect way to market unproven treatments to potential customers. The ladies in this story paid thousands of dollars for the privilege of being a guinea pig.
And now with the "21st Century Cures Act" the standards for collecting human subject research data have been relaxed...
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
We already know what happened here. Some people in Florida injected mesenchymal stem cells into the eyes of three people. Mesenchymal stem cells are multipotent, but we already know that they do not form eye tissue. There was a different Japanese study that used induced pluripotent stem cells, which actually showed some promise. Those stem cells actually can become any type of tissue and are much more difficult and expensive to obtain.
So, I don't know about you, but I have a lot of questions about how injecting cells that might turn into bone, cartilage, fat or muscle into someone's eyes is supposed to help prevent blindness. And I would expect a lot of good answers and prior studies before having them do that to people.
Yeah. Let the free market solve everything! Once enough people go blind, why, these businesses will surely go down in flames because nobody will be able to find them anymore!
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.