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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Aaron LevineAaron D. Levine, associate professor in the School of Public Policy, was quoted in “Clinics Offering Unproven Stem Cell Therapies Are Proliferating Across the U.S.” for the MIT Technology Review.
Excerpt:
At least 351 U.S. businesses are offering unproven stem cell interventions in clinics across the country, claiming to treat everything from arthritis to Alzheimer’s, according to a paper published Thursday in the journal Cell Stem Cell. The finding casts light on an emerging area of medical treatment that has received little attention from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
“It is hard to do a project like this and think the FDA is doing a good job regulating the marketplace,” says Leigh Turner, a bioethicist at the University of Minnesota who performed the study along with Paul Knoepfler, a stem cell researcher at UC Davis.
Concern over unregulated stem cell therapies is not new, but the issue was previously thought to be mostly confined to patients who traveled abroad for treatments unavailable or forbidden domestically. These renegade treatments can be ineffective and dangerous. Just last week the New England Journal of Medicine described an incident in which surgeons discovered a sticky mass of foreign cells in someone’s spine after he got injections of fetal stem cells in several different countries.
The article can be read in full here.
