Posted on 07/10/2013 10:45:23 PM PDT by neverdem
Italian officials should not go ahead with expensive clinical tests of an unproven stem-cell therapy that has no good scientific basis.
The Italian government is planning to oversee a clinical trial of a controversial stem-cell therapy. There are many reasons for the trial to be stopped — and no good reason for it to be carried out.
Last week, Nature revealed that the method used by Italian researcher Davide Vannoni, founder of the Stamina Foundation in Brescia, to treat scores of very sick patients is based on flawed data. The revelation struck a major nerve, and hit the front pages of the main newspapers in Italy, as well as featuring on television and radio talk shows. A highly emotional debate about whether Stamina therapy works, or could ever work, has been running long and hot for months. Vannoni denies any wrongdoing.
The reverberations of Nature’s exposé are still being felt. Negative coverage in Italian newspapers has featured patients who received the Stamina therapy on compassionate grounds. At the same time, pro-Vannoni demonstrations have been organized by families of patients who see him as...
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The very unlikeliness of the Stamina story should have made the Italian government extremely wary. Vannoni claims to be executing cures that he prefers to conduct without oversight by independent parties. He has provided no detailed protocol to the authorities even though his treatment is invasive — it involves drawing marrow from the bones of patients, manipulating the cells in vitro (ostensibly to condition them into becoming healing stem cells) and injecting them back into the patients’ veins or spinal cord. He insists that his therapy can only be prepared by his own people, without using good manufacturing practice (GMP). His operation has moved from city to city as public prosecutors try to pin him down...
(Excerpt) Read more at nature.com ...
This looks more like quackery, IMHO.
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