Originally published June 16 2005
Fetal stem cells help 10 heart failure patients in Educador recover fast
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
A Wired article reports that 10 heart failure patients at a treatment center in Ecuador were recovering quickly after having their hearts implanted with fetal stem cells.
Frederico Benetti, one of the surgeons on the study and pioneer of so-called beating heart surgery presented the data on Saturday at the International Society for Minimally Invasive Cardiothoracic Surgery annual meeting in New York.
"We need to be very cautious because this is the first time in the world these cells are implanted into the heart of patients," Benetti said.
"The change we observed in fetal cells in one week we saw in autologous cells after 20 days (to) one month.
The results may lend credibility to a Barbados clinic called the Institute for Regenerative Medicine, which supplied the cells and funded the study.
The clinic is controversial according to some scientists because the fetal cell therapies have not been proven safe and effective by controlled clinical trials necessary for approval in the United States and other Western countries.
"We spent four months looking at the documents and I had Leonard (Makowka, the company's senior scientific consultant) go through them and after reviewing approximately 1,700 case studies going back 10 years, we saw no adverse side effects," Suskind said.
"I am skeptical of anyone who goes straight to patients off-shore and does not publish animal data first and then go through rigorous screening in this country to conduct a proper clinical trial," said Evan Snyder, program director in stem cells and regeneration at the Burnham Institute in La Jolla, California.
Snyder said he is willing to keep an open mind once the scientists describe the cells in detail and provide more data with double blind controls.
A handful of similar clinics are operating in underdeveloped countries, including Medra in the Dominican Republic.
Suskind's Institute of Regenerative Medicine, however, may be one of the few, if not the only off-shore clinic recording data with at least the intention of publishing in scientific journals.
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