Italian stem-cell trial based on flawed data

Nature News ^ | 02 July 2013 | Alison Abbott

[neverdem]

Scientists raise serious concerns about a patent that forms the basis of a controversial stem-cell therapy.

Davide Vannoni, a psychologist turned medical entrepreneur, has polarized Italian society in the past year with a bid to get his special brand of stem-cell therapy authorized. He has gained fervent public support with his claims to cure fatal illnesses — and equally fervent opposition from many scientists who say that his treatment is unproven.

Now those scientists want the Italian government to pull out of a €3-million (US$3.9-million) clinical trial of the therapy that it promised to support in May, after bowing to patient pressure. They allege that Vannoni's method of preparing stem cells is based on flawed data.

And Nature's own investigation suggests that images used in the 2010 patent application, on which Vannoni says his method is based, are duplicated from previous, unrelated papers.

The trial is “a waste of money and gives false hope to desperate families”, says Paolo Bianco, a stem-cell researcher at the University of Rome and one of the scientists who says that Vannoni’s 2010 application to the US patent office does not stand up to scrutiny.

“I am not surprised to learn this,” says Luca Pani, director-general of the Italian Medicines Agency (AIFA), which suspended operations at the Brescia-based laboratories of Vannoni's Stamina Foundation in May 2012, after inspectors concluded that the labs would not...

--snip--

Like Vannoni's patent, Schegelskaya's paper looked at coaxing bone-marrow cells to differentiate into nerve cells. But whereas Vannoni's patent says that the transformation involved incubating cultured bone-marrow cells for two hours in an 18-micromolar solution of retinoic acid dissolved in ethanol, Schegelskaya's paper uses a retinoic acid solution with only one-tenth of that concentration, and incubates the cells for several days. So the identical figures represent very different experimental conditions...

[neverdem]

This looks more like quackery, IMHO.

[neverdem]

Trial and error - Italian officials should not go ahead with expensive clinical tests of an unproven stem-cell therapy that has no good scientific basis.

FReepmail me if you want on or off my stem cell/regenerative medicine ping list.

This looks more like an attempt to discredit adult stem cells from bone marrow.

[count-your-change]

Sounds like the were some corners cut. No one wants to tell a patient with a life threatening illness that the treatment isn’t ready

[1010RD]

Successful societies, those that build wealth generally, are built on trust relationships which in turn are built by honest people. That is to say deeply religious people.

America continues to plummet on every honesty scale and is way down from the 1950s levels of honesty. What happened?

God was and is being systematically removed from the public square. Let’s reintroduce Him to the general public.