Tragic results of stem cell ‘cures’

Medical regulators have been warning that the downside of unproven stem cell treatments isn’t merely that they won’t work, but that they can be life-threatening.

A team of Canadian physicians has just reported an especially gruesome example of what can go wrong when desperate patients chase after lastditch cures in what’s known as stem cell tourism. Their subject is a 38-year-old Newfoundland man who became a paraplegic after a trampoline accident at the age of 20 injured his spinal column.

Six years later, he traveled to Portugal for a stem cell treatment. Doctors there transplanted olfactory mucosal cells drawn from his upper nasal passages into the site of his spinal injury. He never got better, but years later started getting worse.

Doctors at Memorial University of Newfoundland discovered that the olfactory cells had never differentiated into neuronal cells, as the Portuguese clinic apparently expected, but kept growing on their own, producing a tumor of nasal cells that’s now too large to be surgically removed.

“This was a young man with a life-altering injury and would have tried anything for a chance to walk again,” Nanette Hache, one of the physicians, told me. The Portuguese operation cost $50,000, plus possibly that much more for travel, accommodations and postoperative support. The doctors published (with the patient’s consent) “because we want to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen to anyone else.”

As many as three other similar cases have been identified in scientific journal reports, according to Leigh Turner, a bioethicist at the University of Minnesota who has been tracking the proliferation of unproven stem cell treatments for several years. All went to the same clinic in Portugal, which has claimed to have treated more than 120 patients.

Medical experts have started warning in earnest of the hazards of stem cell tourism. As regulators in the U.S., Canada and parts of Europe have cracked down on promoters of stem cell treatments that have no scientific validity, clinics in less-regulated locales have stepped into the void. These promoters are not only relatively unaccountable to government oversight, they often can avoid reporting negative outcomes of their handiwork that might warn off potential victims.

Last year, Berlin-based