In a report issued in the journal Cell Stem Cell, scientists warn of the dangers of misleading and outright fraudulent stem cell therapies that may cause more harm than good.  The report says that the growing research and excitement caused by stem cell science “has led to unacceptable exploitation of patients’ hopes and fears”.

This comes in response to a growing wave of so-called stem cell treatments that promise to cure everything from dementias to tumors.  People with no hope of a cure for devastating illnesses are desperately mortgaging their homes or wiping out their life’s savings to get treatments, usually in foreign countries where the regulations are looser than in the United States.  Most of these treatments are the “21st century version of snake oil”, says Dr. Arnold Kriegstein, the director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research with the University of California in San Francisco.

“As soon as you scratch the surface, you realize that what they’re claiming in their literature or what they tell you about, doesn’t make sense,” says Kriegstein.  “There’s this notion that stem cells are in some way magic cells that can treat anything if you just deliver them into the body.  That’s pseudoscience and make-believe.”

Dr.Irving Weissman, director of the Stanford Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine co-authored the report.  He also led a task force that created a website, http://www.closerlookatstemcells.org/, sponsored by the International Society for Stem Cell Research.  Through that site, people can find out about proven therapies, new research and learn of the frauds that are out there.