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Nov. 8, 2004 issue
Vladimir
Bryntsalov, a Moscow pharmaceutical tycoon, decided last
year on the advice of
a friend to seek a treatment for
the gray hair and wrinkles that come with being 58 years old.
He had a potent mixture of human embryonic stem cells injected
under his skin. It is a radical procedure with unpredictable
results under any circumstances, let alone in a Moscow beauty
salon. A few weeks later, Bryntsalov was as gray, wrinkled
and tired as ever — and sported several pea-size tumors on
his face. He began to doubt that the salon was legitimate. "They
didn't have a laboratory, nothing," he says. "Who knows where
[the stem cells] came from?"
Welcome to the frontiers of stem-cell
therapy. Much of the world's collective medical intellect is
being trained on these little cells, which appear in their
purest, most powerful form in the first few days of a developing
embryo. They have the unique power to turn into any type of
cell found in the human body. Because they're so controversial,
proponents have taken to hyping their promise as a medical
treatment. The message that seems to have gotten through to
people like Vladimir Bryntsalov is this: stem cells are the
key to curing incurable human ailments. And if stem cells might
fix spinal-cord injuries and Parkinson's, think what they'll
do for baldness!
Stem cells, of course, are a long way from
curing anything — treatments are at present largely theoretical.
But that hasn't stopped about 50 beauty salons and medical
clinics in Moscow from using stem cells in a variety of cosmetic
treatments and other remedies, often under the guise of medical
research. They operate unregulated by the government and often
without adequate medical supervision. Many of them don't even
take medical histories from patients, much less follow up on
possible complications. By some accounts, those complications
can be severe: tumors, depressed immune systems and blood infections.
And the treatments have virtually no scientific or medical
merit. In the worst case, stem-cell injections "have clear
potential to grow into a malignant tumor," says Dr. Timothy
Hardingham of the Centre for Tissue Engineering in Manchester,
England. At best, the Russian doctors' practices are "close
to witchcraft."
The clinics claim to be able to cure wrinkles,
hair loss, dry skin and some dental problems by injecting what
are claimed to be cultures of stem cells, taken from human
embryos, under the skin. Some clinics cultivate patients' own
adult stem cells — typically found in bone marrow or fat, they
are much more limited in their ability to morph into other
types of cells — and then inject them intravenously. A 50-year-old
American woman suffering from anxiety and sleeplessness traveled
to Moscow last month to Stem Cell Higher Technologies Inc.
for her second $15,000 treatment in two years. It's a big expense
on her $65,000-a-year salary, but "within two months of the
first treatment I could finally rest normally," she says. "I
could finally concentrate again at work."
Are the benefits
worth the risks? In the absence of scientific studies there's
no way of knowing. The American patient could be experiencing
a miracle cure or a placebo effect. The risks could be significant.
Aside from the possibility of infection, nobody really knows
what stem cells do when placed among the tissues of the human
body. No clinical trials have been done on stem cells as a
treatment for wrinkles.
In a sense, Moscow is now running the
world's biggest clinical trial of stem-cell therapy for cosmetic
purposes. But any result is inherently suspect: in a true clinical
trial, doctors would be gathering data according to a well-designed
research plan. That's hardly the case in Moscow. Following
a 10-minute consultation with a cosmetologist, one beauty salon,
located in an apartment building in a Moscow residential neighborhood,
is ready to begin an $800 series of three stem-cell injections
aimed at wrinkle removal.
It's not clear what's being injected
beneath patients' skin. Are they embryonic stem cells harvested
from days-old embryos? Such "undifferentiated" cells would
be the most promising candidates for repairing organs, from
alcohol-addled livers to wrinkled skin, but they are also the
least predictable and potentially most dangerous. "If we introduce
undifferentiated cells into the body of a person with low immunity,
then there's a high risk of cancer," says Gennady Sukhikh,
a stem-cell scientist from the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Some clinics advertise human-embryonic stem cells, but in fact
take them from pig embryos. The Kosmeton clinic, which rents
space in a tony Moscow neighborhood from a medical facility
with ties to the Kremlin, openly admits to luring patients
with empty promises. "In our advertisements, we say that we
have stem cells," says Yelena Chelishcheva, who works at the
clinic. Clients actually get an injection of skin cells.
Nobody
is saying which, if any, clinics are using the superpotent
undifferentiated cells and where they come from. Clinics that
use older cells buy them from the Medicine and Biotechnology
Co. in Yekaterinburg, the only firm licensed to produce and
sell the cells for medical purposes. Business is booming. The
firm has offices in 30 cities and plans to open its own treatment
clinics. The salons pay about $50 for a 10-milliliter dose
of stem cells, enough for a single treatment that typically
costs patients more than $150.
None of these beauty salons
operates legally, according to Andrei Yuriev, an official with
the Federal Inspection Service for Health and Social Development. "But,
for now, we're not going after the offenders," he says. The
service has 131 inspectors to oversee the entire country. Cracking
down on beauty salons, he says, is the job of the country's
notoriously corrupt police. Meanwhile, the number of clinics
in Moscow is mushrooming. Bryntsalov, even after three months
of painstaking removal of his facial tumors, is now getting
injections of adult stem cells taken from his bone marrow.
(He's switched clinics, however.) By his own account, he's
spent "hundreds of thousands of dollars" on the treatment and
signed up his daughter and two sisters. "My gray hair is growing
darker. I'm losing wrinkles," he raves. "And I feel like I
did when I was 20." The clinic, the Institute of Biological
Medicine, is licensed as a medical-research facility and has
a waiting list that stretches until March. The chief physician,
Dr. Yury Bloshansky, insists he's operating within the law.
Other clinic owners are lobbying health officials for licenses
to perform adult-stem-cell treatments.
Ironically, serious
science may yet benefit from the Russian free-for-all. Dr.
Andrei Bryukhovetsky, a scientist at Moscow's Cancer Institute,
is using the adult stem cells of spinal-injury victims to repair
vertebrae. "This is the one area where we are ahead of the
Americans," says Bryukhovetsky, "and it's only because our
laws allow us to use stem cells, both embryonic and adult."
Bryukhovetsky
also has a front-row seat when stem-cell treatments go wrong.
A 23-year-old woman, who had paid $10,000 for a series of stem-cell
injections for a concussion, went to Bryukhovetsky complaining
of severe headaches and a breakdown in her immune system. The
risks are obvious to him, if not to all.
©
2004 Newsweek, Inc.
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