A patient coping with emphysema came close to a lung transplant only to find out that the donor long was unfit, according to NY Times.
The woman, Maggie Alejos, 65, has battled through the disease for more than a dozen years of her life which resulted to her becoming rail-thin and having an oxygen tube anchored above her upper lip. At the hospital, doctors affiliated with the Regenerative Medicine 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.
Alejos learned about the Tijuana Institute across the Internet where adult stem cells are promoted as a cure for everything from sagging skin to severed spinal cords. On the surface, the claim may seem plausible. Scientists have discovered that fat, bone marrow and other parts of 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.
