stem cells

Knit One, Pearl Two

February 10, 2020 by Bill McCormick

Way back in the early ears of World News Center I wrote a fun article about medical advancements that were coming down the pike at a rapid rate. One, human limb regeneration, has hit a tiny snag. Simply put, it doesn’t work. Here’s the thing, while many life forms on our planet can, and do, regenerate limbs, they are far less complex than people. The working parts in a simple hand number thirteen and that’s just an overview. Fingers count as one, for example. Add in the capillaries, supporting tissues, and so on and there’s a lot that needs to happen, in the right order, to make one work. But all is not lost. The science behind the research is still yielding some amazing results. “How amazing?” you ask tentatively.
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The Future is Now

January 3, 2019 by Bill McCormick

I like to dive into the wonderful world of weird science from time to time. Often I find stuff that will be possible in a few years, decades, or eventually. But, sometimes, I find myself gobsmacked by what’s happening now. What’s available now. What could save your life, extend it, or just make it more palatable. The American Certification Agency for Healthcare Professionals took a look at what’s out there now and its efficacy.
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Helping & Not Helping

March 15, 2018 by Bill McCormick

You’re better off just having a Scooby snack

Have you or a loved succumbed to polio lately? Been exposed to a town riddled with small pox? Have you ever seen someone decimated by Rubella? The odds are staggeringly in favor of the answer being no to all of those. The reason behind each and every negative answer is science. At one time or another scientists tested, retested, and then vetted the results through peer reviewed research. Once that was done, and patients were living as opposed to not, then the public was invited to join in. When there was a sincere national or global threat, governments would jump in and make the cure compulsory, with rare exceptions. Fatal disease after fatal disease fell into the dustbin of history.

But, now, thanks to the efforts of the ignorant and the greedy, they’re all making comebacks. Today, since I’m a masochist with a blog, I’m going to try and sort through some of the bullshit and keep you from dying a stupid death.

Of all the current “stem cell” cures that populate the internet there is one, I hope you can count that high, that has been shown to work.

Bill Selak, at IFL Sicence, explains.

Imagine if a trip to the dentist to treat a cavity didn’t involve a filling, root canal, or crown. What if a simple light treatment could actually get your teeth to regrow themselves using stem cells? That’s the aim of a group of researchers at Harvard’s Wyss Institute, led by David Mooney, who have found success in regrowing rat teeth in this manner. The researchers have developed a technique using a low-power laser to coax stem cells into reforming dentin, which could have implications for dentistry, wound healing, and bone restoration. The results of the study have been published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Proteins known as growth factors are what cause stem cells to differentiate into whatever type of cell they are bound to become. Introducing different growth factors force the cells to develop the desired type of tissue. Unfortunately, it isn’t quite as simple as it sounds. Most of the developments in using stem cells in regenerative medicine have regrown tissues in vitro and later need to be transplanted into the person. This involves a lot of technical care and is a highly regulated process, which slows down progress. Mooney’s team claims they have come up with a new technique that could streamline the process, making it a viable clinical option much more quickly.

The team set up a miniature dentist office-like setting for the rodents used in the study. They drilled holes into the rats’ molars to simulate tooth decay. Next, adult stem cells were applied to the pulp of the tooth and a non-ionizing, low-level laser was used to stimulate the growth factors. The teeth were then sealed with a temporary cap to be worn over the next 12 weeks. The follow-up x-rays and microscopy analysis showed that the dentin, the layer under the visible enamel, had indeed begun to grow back due to the laser/stem cell therapy.

In essence, nothing new is introduced into your body. They’re your stem cells and the laser is barely more powerful than the annoying pointer your boss uses in Powerpoint presentations. So, hooray for happy teeth!

But for every coin there’s another side.

Dennis Thompson, over at Health Daily News, takes a look at the hundreds of “arthritis cures” using stem cells and comes up wanting.

A same-day injection for one knee costs thousands of dollars at these centers, according to a consumer survey taken of clinics across the United States.

People are paying that kind of cash because two-thirds of stem cell clinics promise that their treatments work 80 to 100 percent of the time, researchers report.

But there’s no medical evidence suggesting that any stem cell therapy can provide a lasting cure for knee arthritis, said study lead researcher Dr. George Muschler, an orthopedic surgeon with the Cleveland Clinic.

“There are claims made about efficacy [effectiveness] that aren’t supported by the literature,” Muschler said. “There’s a risk of charlatanism, and patients should be aware.”

Stem cells have gained a reputation as a miracle treatment and potential cure for many ailments. The cells have the potential to provide replacement cells for any part of the body — blood, brain, bones or organs.

As a result, a wave of stem cell centers have opened up around the country, offering cures for a variety of diseases, Muschler said.

“It’s very sexy to market yourself as a stem cell center, so there’s been a boom of centers, probably close to 600 now in the United States offering this therapy,” Muschler said. “But the truth is that the medical literature hasn’t quite caught up to the enthusiasm in the marketplace.”

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has expressed extreme skepticism over these centers, and in November the agency announced that it would crack down on clinics offering dangerous stem cell treatments.

The “pie-in-the-sky” dream for knee arthritis patients is that a stem cell injection will produce fresh new protective cartilage in their joint, said Dr. Scott Rodeo, an orthopedic surgeon with the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City.

“The reality is they don’t do that. There is zero data to suggest that,” said Rodeo, who wasn’t involved with the study. “The idea these cells are going to regenerate cartilage — there’s zero data.”

At best, these injections might temporarily reduce pain and inflammation by prompting the release of soothing chemicals in the knee, Rodeo and Muschler said.

If you’re going to spend thousands of dollars on temporary pain relief you may as well just stock up on Ibuprofen.

since I could go on for days about various scams (quit drinking your own pee, quit eating the fucking copper pills, and leave seawood to do what God itended, wrap sushi) the nice people over at e-Health came up with a nice list of basic things to avoid.

Alternative Therapies
to Avoid

Cure-All Products

If one pill promises to cure your diabetes, Lyme disease and seasonal allergies all at once, it’s probably a scam. Science is far more precise than that, and evidence shows that many conditions are unrelated and must be treated individually.

Quick Fixes

Beware of any product that makes claims such as “30 days or less” or that promises a cure for a complicated health problem in short order. There are rarely quick fixes in life, and if one existed, it’s likely your doctor would have prescribed it for you already.

All Natural

This is a phrase that has been terribly abused. It has been used to convince people that natural is the same as safe, which is misleading. Many natural things are not safe for humans, such as arsenic. Just because something is labeled “all natural” doesn’t mean you should take it or use it.

Miracle Cure

Even if you’ve grown mistrustful of conventional medical care, you can be certain that if a miracle cure were discovered, it would be widely reported and confirmed by medical professionals, scientists and all the major news outlets. If that’s not the case, be wary.

When holistic care is done well, it can be very effective. If you decide to go down this road, do it wisely. Get a recommendation from someone you trust before choosing a practitioner. You can also contact well-respected medical associations for a list of holistic care providers in your area.

Once you make an appointment, do all you can to research the education, training and track record of the doctor you’ve chosen. When you meet the doctor, pay attention to how you’re treated. Are you seen as a whole person and not just a problem to solve? Does the physician use any of the phrases mentioned above? If so, find a new doctor immediately.

Now, all that being said, holistic therapies, when used in conjunction with modern medicine, can be beneficial. Marijuana, for example, has been shown to ease pain, reduce seizures, and calm persistent anxieties. What it does not do, and has shown no ability to do, is cure cancer, diabetes, liver disease or anything else. I recently lost a friend who rejected traditional treatment in favor of THC based therapy. All I can say is she was calm when she died. But, like Steve Jobs before her, there was no reason for her to have died. The cancer was caught early enough that the odds were close to 95% she would have lived a full life.

A complete list of “alternative therapies” that either do no good or can kill you can be found by clicking this link.

In short, get your kids vaccinated, stay away from shit on the internet that has no medical support or, worse, just one doctor who claims he or she has found something millions of others have missed, and think for a minute before you act. There is no reason for “big pharma” to let you die. There is zero benefit in it for them. Odds are you’ll get sick from something and you’ll need to buy something they sell. They can’t sell to dead people.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
Stay up to date with his podcasts here and here.
contact Bill McCormick
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We’re Getting Better

September 21, 2017 by Bill McCormick

While the Internet keeps puking up stuff that is supposed to make you healthy but will, in reality, get you killed, or, at least, not make you any better, there have been some stunning advances in the real world. Granted, they use that magic science stuff and not something cool someone once said their Aunt Sadie swore might work. If you believed and sent $100 to someone somewhere. These remedies, and I use that term incorrectly here, are only slightly less effective than praying for rainbows or sending good vibes via Twitter. Steve Jobs chased a holistic rainbow and died because of it.

Alice G. Walton, over at Forbes, sums it up.

According to Steve Jobs’ biographer, Walter Isaacson, the Apple mastermind eventually came to regret the decision he had made years earlier to reject potentially life-saving surgery in favor of alternative treatments like acupuncture, dietary supplements and juices. Though he ultimately embraced the surgery and sought out cutting-edge experimental methods, they were not enough to save him.

Jobs’ cancer had been discovered by chance during a CT scan in 2003 to look for kidney stones, during which doctors saw a “shadow” on his pancreas. Isaacson told CBS’ 60 Minutes last night that while the news was not good, the upside was that the form of pancreatic cancer from which Jobs suffered (a neuroendocrine islet tumor) was one of the 5% or so that are slow growing and most likely to be cured.

Kids, those doctor people aren’t perfect, no human is, but when faced with something like this you should get a second diagnosis, not skip to Mexico and drink magic juices. Just FYI, the cure rate for what he had, in the stage it was caught, runs around 95%. In other words, had he lived the world would probably have been spared a $1,000 i-Phone that finally is capable of mimicking an Android.

I have previously written about how science is closer to an actual cure for Alzheimer’s, worked out a method so the paralyzed can walk, and heal wounds with an easy to apply polymer that requires no special treatment. You can read about all of those by clicking the link.

And now, since you’ve been kind enough to read this far, I’m going to share some new cures that are headed to a doctor near you.

Let’s start with cancer. Lydia Ramsey, on loan to Science Alert from Business Insider, says that science has discovered a way for patients to, literally, heal themselves with a little help from a medical professional.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) just approved a cutting-edge cancer therapy.

On Wednesday, the FDA approved Novartis’s Kymriah, also known as tisagenlecleucel, a treatment for pediatric acute lymphoblastic lymphoblastic leukemia.

“I think this is most exciting thing I’ve seen in my lifetime,” Dr. Tim Cripe, an oncologist who was part of the FDA advisory committee panel that voted in favour of approving the drug in July.

The highly personalised treatment is called CAR T-cell therapy. It’s a type of cancer immunotherapy — or a therapy that harnesses the body’s immune system to take on cancer cells.

“We’re entering a new frontier in medical innovation with the ability to reprogram a patient’s own cells to attack a deadly cancer,” FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb said in a statement.

“New technologies such as gene and cell therapies hold out the potential to transform medicine and create an inflection point in our ability to treat and even cure many intractable illnesses. At the FDA, we’re committed to helping expedite the development and review of groundbreaking treatments that have the potential to be life-saving.”

Short for chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy, CAR-T treatment takes a person’s own cells, removes them from the body, re-engineers them, and then puts the cells back in the body where they can attack cancer cells.

Novartis’ therapy is one of two cutting-edge treatments for blood cancers are poised to get approved by the end of the year.

The FDA is also expected to make a decision about another CAR-T treatment from Kite Pharma, which just got acquired by Gilead Sciences. That’s for Kite’s CAR-T treatment for aggressive B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma (more general than DLBCL).

In data Kite released in February, the company found that out of the 101 patients, 36 percent had a complete response to the treatment after six months.

It’s a type of cancer that Novartis wants to get approval for in the future.

In June, Novartis released data from its Phase 2 trial of CTL019 in patients with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL for short), an aggressive form of lymphoma that’s one of the two types Kite’s data looks at. The trial found that of the 51 patients with DLBCL, 23 had either a complete response (meaning cancer had disappeared completely) or a partial response (meaning their tumour displayed signs that it was shrinking).

Back in June of 2015 I wrote about how scientists were using stem cells to speed the healing of damaged bone tissue. For example, the kind of damage people suffer when they go through chemo, have muscular dystrophy, have been in a severe accident, and so on. That treatment, which works and is getting more advanced, basically grinds up the bones of random dead people, extracts the varied stem cells, and slams the resulting genetic slurree into a patient via a needle.

Scientists have long known that stem cells are key to human life and healing. Now they are figuring out how to make that knowledge work for you. And those you love.

Right now the treatments listed above for cancer cure run about $300,000 a pop. Everyone is well aware that’s not feasible for the average patient. But, if it can be mass produced, the treatment – not your stem cells, that will bring down the price. They are also looking to the government for subsidies. I’ll keep you posted on that.

One side note, while this is prohibitively expensive, the costs for current drugs can run around $10,000 a month, and some therapies can run upwards of $30,000 per month, not including the additional expenses for the care of the patient. Wiser minds than mine might see the new treatment as cost effective when everything is factored in.

Another thing stem cell treatment has been lauded for is its ability to repair permanently damaged cells. Well, in theory at least. Now, its a fact.

I’ll let Meg Aldrich, over at USC News, tell the story since she does a better job at it than I could.

On March 6, just shy of his 21st birthday, Kristopher (Kris) Boesen of Bakersfield suffered a traumatic injury to his cervical spine when his car fishtailed on a wet road, hit a tree and slammed into a telephone pole.

His parents were warned there was a good chance their son would be permanently paralyzed from the neck down. However, they also learned that he could possibly qualify for a clinical study that might help.

Enter Keck Medical Center of USC, which announced that a team of doctors became the first in California to inject its patient with an experimental treatment made from stem cells as part of a multi-center clinical trial.

Charles Liu, director of the USC Neurorestoration Center, led the surgical team, working in collaboration with the Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center and Keck Medicine of USC, that injected an experimental dose of 10 million AST-OPC1 cells directly into Boesen’s cervical spinal cord in early April.

“Typically, spinal cord injury patients undergo surgery that stabilizes the spine but generally does very little to restore motor or sensory function,” Liu explained. “With this study, we are testing a procedure that may improve neurological function, which could mean the difference between being permanently paralyzed and being able to use one’s arms and hands. Restoring that level of function could significantly improve the daily lives of patients with severe spinal injuries.”

Two weeks after surgery, Boesen began to show signs of improvement. Three months later, he’s able to feed himself, use his cellphone, write his name, operate a motorized wheelchair and hug his friends and family. Improved sensation and movement in both arms and hands also makes it easier for him to care for himself, and to envision a life lived more independently.

“As of 90 days post-treatment, Kris has gained significant improvement in his motor function, up to two spinal cord levels,” Liu said. “In Kris’ case, two spinal cord levels mean the difference between using your hands to brush your teeth, operate a computer or do other things you wouldn’t otherwise be able to do, so having this level of functional independence cannot be overstated.”

Doctors are careful not to predict Boesen’s future progress.

“All I’ve wanted from the beginning was a fighting chance,” said Boesen, who has a passion for repairing and driving sports cars and was studying to become a life insurance broker at the time of the accident. “But if there’s a chance for me to walk again, then heck yeah! I want to do anything possible to do that.”

There is a lot more to that article and I hope you’ll take the time to click the link and read it all. In the meantime, if you, or someone you know, is interested in partaking in the treatment, here is the info:

To qualify for the clinical trial, enrollees must be between the age of 18 and 69, and their condition must be stable enough to receive an injection of AST-OPC1 between the 14th and 30th days following injury.

Keck Medical Center is one of six sites in the United States that is authorized to enroll subjects and administer the clinical trial dosage.

Just click the Keck Medical Center link to get in touch with them. They will help you find the treatment center closest to you.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
Stay up to date with his podcasts here and here.
contact Bill McCormick
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stem cells

Alternative Therapies to Avoid

Alternative Therapies
to Avoid