Celltex

Celltex

CellTex is a company offer stem cell treatments. The Celltex controversy has snowballed into a much bigger story than I ever expected it would be. This is largely thanks to the unfounded attacks of Carl Elliott and Leigh Turner, both of whom are faculty members of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota. Elliott published a detailed article of the situation in Slate, which was later retracted for being below the editorial standards of the magazine. The magazine issued a personal apology to McGee:

Editor’s Note

Slate withdraws "The Celltex Affair."

By David Plotz|Posted Wednesday, Feb. 29, 2012, at 9:43 PM ET

On Feb. 17, 2012, Slate published an article titled “The Celltex Affair: An Ethics Scandal Strikes the World of Bioethics.” Because of shortcomings in the editorial process, the article did not meet Slate’s standards for verification and fairness and should not have been published. We withdraw the article and apologize to Dr. Glenn McGee.

More recently, a different law firm, representing Celltex, has sent a letter to the office of the president of the University of Minnesota stating that Elliott is guilty of libel. For the record, I think that both Elliott and Turner should be lambasted by their university and the community at large for their outrageous critiques of CellTex's stem cell treatments.

Celltex supplies stem cells to at least one local physician and pays him a $500 commission for each use. It seems to me the company should be open about what it does with the cells it banks and processes, what it tells patients they can be used for, how they are described and delivered to physicians. To this end they have placed this information on-line.

And just as Celltex has done right by making a full disclosure of its practices, now that McGee has quit the company, the editor-in-chief role at AJoB, his position at the Center for Practical Bioethics, and his position on the board of directors at the ICMS, he has used his inside knowledge to help clear the air and make a valuable contribution to understanding the factors at play in this controversy. 

In summary, CellTex finds itself being attacked by academic scientists who are either trying to create a career around controversies in stem cell medicine or those like me, who write to protect the patent interests of universities (potentially worth billions). Stem cell clinics represent a competitive interest to many in the patents for dollars game. Hopefully the U Minn administration will recognize that the attacks launched by Elliott and Turner are very personal. I anticipate that  McGee will live up to his promise to provide "timely, lengthy, pointed comments on the matter."

New revelations in Grekos case

New revelations in Grekos case

The Naples News has published dramatic new developments in the case surrounding Zannos Grekos, who has been accused by the Florida state medical board of injecting an elderly and very ill patient with stem cells in his Bonita Springs, FL clinic, despite an emergency restriction specifically prohibiting this activity that was placed on his medical license last year. In the March 19 article, the newspaper reveals that a second Lee County physician, Konstantine K. Yankopolus of Fort Myers, has also had an emergency restriction placed on his license for assisting Grekos. Yankopolus told an NBC news reporter that he considered his action in assisting Grekos in the procedure to be "humanitarian." I have not been able to find how much the patient was charged for this particular unscientific treatment, but Regenocyte has typically charged $65,000. 

Yankopolus unrepentant

Even more interestingly, according to the article, the medical board has alleged that Yankopolus "entered a false progress note in (the patient's) chart falsely indicating that no stem cell preparation was infused." 

Great times in stem cell land

Great times in stem cell land

For much of the past decade, Beike Biotechnology, a private company based Shenzhen, China was one of the most prominent stem cell centers on earth. In its early years Beike founder, Hu Xiang (a.k.a Sean Hu) teamed up with an American professional named Jon Hakim (a.k.a John Harris). Beike has reported treating more patients than almost any other stem cell clinic.

Scott Alexander Moffett (who usually goes by Alex) teamed up with Beike fresh out of a string of successful businesses in south and southeast Asia (visit his public LinkedIn page for a list of companies he has headed). He became the new head of Beike Biotech’s holding company, Beike Holdings and embarked on an impressive campaign to diversify their stem cell business outside of China. In the two and half years he was there, he helped build a network of affiliates and subsidiaries that spanned from Romania to Saudi Arabia to India to Malaysia and Indonesia.

Alex at the World Stem Cell Summit 2009. Watch the video here

But when Hu abruptly sold his stem cell company in late 2010, Moffett followed soon after, buying out the holding company and launching his own new venture, a Bangkok-based “Vanuatu corporation” called Siricell (apparently meaning “The wealth of the cell” in Sanskrit/English), which has the  mission of targeting “age related disease management and to assist in the extension of life until the Singularity Nexus expands the scope and capacities of our work in these areas.” For those of you who don’t read life extension books, the “Singularity” is a proposed future point at which technological development makes it possible to extend human lifespan radically or perhaps even indefinitely. Whether that is achieved through unforeseeable and unlikely advances in medicine, or by uploading a digitized simulacrum of one’s neural network into a computer, I for one will not be holding my breath for it to arrive. (But good luck to all the True Believers!)

And there are many true believers indeed, represented enthusiastically by the SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) Foundation, an anti-aging research group headed by Aubrey de Grey, with backing from such impressive backers as PayPal co-founder and Ron Paul’s favorite sugardaddy Peter Thiel and “Internet entrepreneur” Jason Hope. (If you had hundreds of millions of dollars, as these two do, you might try to live forever too.) Interestingly, the SENS Foundation is listed on the Siricell website as a member of the advisory board.

Moffett himself is no stranger to out-of-the-box thinking. He did spend nearly 20 years, after all, at the helm of various companies in the "ayurceutics" and herbal medicine space. And, as with his most Singular stem cells, and apparently drum machine technology (see Linn Moffet Electronics) as well, his expertise was self-taught (see Education). He also spent quite some time in his youth on the luxurious compound of the Fellowship of Friends, an esoteric group in Northern California established by an elementary school teacher in the early 70s to keep the teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky alive. Moffett previously listed this on his Education history, but now only this screenshot remains.

And what good friends they are!

And now, here in 2012, we find Moffett and Marshank together again in a stem cell venture, with Moffett the Founder, Chairman and CEO and “Visionary Entrepreneur” Marshank the Director of International Development. Rounding out the crew is Narin "Jimmy" Apiraichuk, the youthful former VP of Theravitae, the Bangkok-based stem cell center set up by Don Margolis. Marshank stated via LinkedIn that, “SiriCell now has subsidiaries in India, Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines and the Britisch [sic] Virgin Islands. In 2011 we will be opening subsidiaries in Panama and Egypt.”

I remain convinced that Moffett and Marshank have stumbled upon the stem cell fountain of youth.

Stemedica

Stemedica is a San Diego-based stem cell company founded in the mid nineties to harness and commercialize "adult stem cell technology and therapies for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases." The principal movers and shakers behind the launch of this private venture were two American brothers - Roger and Maynard Howe - and their longtime Russian business partner, Nikolai Tankovich. The Brothers Howe have said they were driven to this area of medicine after a sister-in-law was severely injured in a car accident in 2004 that left her paraplegic, and after hearing of miraculous advances in cell medicine in the former Soviet Union. A compelling story...

After taking their sister-in-law to Moscow for stem cell injections in 2006, the company reported that, "Within four months, many basic life-functioning abilities began to return and [she] was able regain her independence". By the next year the Stemedica team had announced a network of international treatment centers in places like Mexico, Italy, Switzerland and France, with others to follow in Bermuda and Korea. The plan was to use various types of "adult stem cells" (apparently including fetal-derived neural cells), in combination with lasers and other devices, to treat diseases such as "stroke, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, ischemic head trauma, spinal cord injury, diseases of the eye such as age-related macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy as well as skin, scar and bone regeneraton". 

A visitor to the Stemedica website circa 2007 was also greeted with an impressive list of institutional "strategic relationships" sporting the logos of Stanford, UC Irvine, and the Burnham Institute, among others.

By 2009, the company was well on its way to amassing a collection of biotech merit badges, including state certification of a cGMP cell bank, FDA authorization for a Phase I/II clinical trial, and more recently, a patent on a cellular scaffold invented by Stemedica CTO, Alex Kharazi.

The Regenerative Medicine Institute in Tijuana, Mexico is just 30 miles south of the Stemedica office. The first clinic to be accredited by the ICMS, the RMI (which is set up within the Hospital Angeles Tijuana medical tourism operation in Mexico) offers stem cells for dozens of conditions, from cerebral palsy to frailty syndrome, under a novel business plan in which patients are told that, for $10,000-$35,000 they can buy their way into a "clinical trial". 

The institute's StemCellMX website encourages users "To find out if our trials are right for you please contact us using the form on the right". 

Stemedica's connection is as a provider of allogeneic stem cell technology for use in one such trial for stroke. The StemCellMX website, however, explains how a different Howe brother, David (who has an M.D. from Ross University in the Dominican Republic), accompanied 19 patients with serious, medical conditions like autism, muscular dystrophy, spinal cord injury and hearing loss to Moscow for similar treatments, claiming 89% improvement. The doctor in charge of these procedures was Nikolay Mironov, a member of the Stemedica Scientific Advisory Board, and the treating physician at Global Stem Cell Health (treating stroke, spinal cord injury, traumatic brain injury, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy, etc.), a company co-founded by former Stemedica director of medical services, Michael Bayer. 

CMO Nikolai Tankovich, a physicist who first struck it rich with a hair-removal laser, before setting up the company Aquaphotonics and developing a bottled water product that was marketed as Penta Water; the company claimed that its structural differences from ordinary water made it better at hydration. This was likely not accurate. 

Alkhass (Amni), Schuller (Stemedica Intl., Amni)

Meanwhile, in the Rest of the World, Stemedica has continued its empire-building. In recent years, they have inked a deal with Jordanian Stem Cell Company, chaired by Prince Asem Bin Nayef of Jordan, and partnered with Amni BioScience, a Middle East regional biz headed by fellow San Diego citizen Sam Alkhass (who also brokered the Jordan alliance), and counting Tankovich and David Howe, as well as Stemedica International chief Frank Schuller, and Mark Tager, Stemedica executive for dermatological operations, and another 'nother Howe brother, Bruce, on its team.

Stemedica is popping up all over Asia, entering a joint venture with AnC Bio in Korea, and launching Stemedica Asia in Singapore. In China, Maynard and David held an Educational Forumwith W.A. Stem Cell Technologies. 

Maynard and David go to Shanghai

Stemedica also shows up in the logo roll on the website for Beijing's IPM Group (also known as Beijing Damcell Bio-Medical Technology), alongside the heraldry for Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge.

Some people might see Kazakhstan as a less than obvious choice for a Phase II clinical trial, but at least two U.S. cardiologists, Nabil Dib and Jackie See, called the announced results "promising" and "impressive" in a recent press release. 

Nabil Dib is the director of cardiovascular research at Mercy Gilbert Medical Center in Arizona, one of the sites where Stemedica isconducting its stroke clinical trial. 

The Brothers Three and Tankovich co-authored a book (The Miracle of Stem Cells). 

Chinese company smartly invests in stem cell anti-aging

Chinese company smartly invests in stem cell anti-aging

Late last year, a Hong Kong-based Caymans-incorporated company, Zmay Holdings, caught the stem cell fever, plunking down around $40 million (a total of 330 mil HKD) in bonds and equity in a deal for a technology that involves growing various types of human stem cells from ordinary somatic cells by treating them with Chinese herbs. This makes sense, as any chemical may induce differentiation in cells.

Zmay, bought the tech from inventor Xiongbin Lin.

Forty mil is big money by any measure. And the new licensees have lost no time in seeking to capitalize on their investment. The Institute of Aging Institute of Anti-Aging Medical Research on Stem Cells (Hong Kong) Limited, which was acquired from Lin as part of the deal, has recently changed its name to 159 Anti-Aging Center (H.K.) Ltd., registered a web domain, and is on a hiring spree.