“This is not a new problem,” he told TMR. “By naming a therapy that is yet to be proven and talking about very preliminary findings, there is a risk of inflaming hopes and potentially leading people to explore options on their own,” she said.Īssociate Professor Laertis Ikonomou, of SUNY Buffalo and co-chair of the ISCT Presidential Task Force on the Use of Unproven and/or Unethical Cell and Gene Therapy, said there had been “a surge of unproven and questionable treatments … some of which are outright fraudulent”. Professor Munsie told TMR the scientific community had to be careful how it communicated new results. “It’s absolutely of interest but this approach needs to now be explored in a well-designed study, where we can get to the heart of whether it truly benefits COVID-19 patients.” “This was a pilot study,” said Professor Megan Munsie from the University of Melbourne, head of engagement, ethics and policy at Stem Cells Australia. One very small but widely reported study from Shanghai University, published in Aging and Disease, gave mesenchymal stem cells to seven COVID-19 pneumonia patients and found their symptoms had improved in two days.īut all sorts of information was missing, including the source and preparation of the cells and timing of administration.

The rationale for MSCs is that, when lodged in the lungs, they can release a range of anti-inflammatory mediators that might help a patient undergoing a cytotoxic storm. The FDA has also cleared a natural killer cell product – spruiked by Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani – for use in a clinical trial, which the developer, Celularity, has misleadingly claimed as “FDA approval”. Scores of studies are under way: the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform’s COVID-19 database had, as of the last week in April, 90 trials of mesenchymal stem or stromal cells. “There must also be a strong stance against the rogue stem-cell clinic industry which has already begun to offer unproven therapies for COVID-19.” Therefore, while there may be a potential role for MSCs and other cell-based therapies in treatment of COVID-19, these need to be investigated in a rationally designed, controlled approach if safety and efficacy are to be demonstrated accurately. “But whether these therapies are effective for treating respiratory virus-induced ARDS is unknown,” he told The Medical Republic.ĭata so far was “either anecdotal or from incomplete, poorly controlled investigations. Professor Daniel Weiss, a pulmonary physician at the University of Vermont who co-authored a recent review of cell therapies in COVID-19 for the European Respiratory Journal, said cell treatments had a strong safety profile and possible efficacy in acute respiratory distress syndrome. Scientists and international bodies including Stem Cells Australia, the International Society for Stem Cell Research, the International Society for Cell and Gene Therapy and EuroStemCell have raised the alarm about the marketing of unproven therapies during the pandemic, warning of damage to patients and to the credibility of the field. Just as the hype for certain drugs has outpaced the science, biotech companies marketing cellular therapies have seen share prices surge, aided by breathless media reporting and celebrity endorsements, while private clinics around the world add COVID-19 to the list of conditions they claim to cure. Wherever there’s an illness, there’s someone pushing a stem cell cure, and so it is with COVID-19. Mesenchymal stem cells may have helpful immunomodulatory effects, but the hype is well ahead of the science

Stem cell treatment for covid