As fears grow about the dangers posed by clinics offering unproven stem-cell treatments, the main professional body for the field is getting tough. The International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) is writing to members who are listed as advisers to clinics offering speculative therapies, demanding they explain themselves. Any who continue to associate themselves with these clinics risk expulsion, the society’s leaders have warned.

Opening the ISSCR’s annual meeting in San Francisco on 16 June, society president Irving Weissman of Stanford University in California vowed to “smoke out the charlatans”.

While the ISSCR has previously attacked clinics offering unproven therapies, Weissman also turned his ire on a minority of the society’s own members who have been named as advisers to clinics operating outside the medical mainstream.

At a press briefing on 17 June, he revealed that these members are being told to explain their connections with such clinics. Expulsion from the society was a possibility for members who continue to associate themselves with unproven “therapies”, added Sean Morrison of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, a member of the ISSCR board of directors.


Quizzed by New Scientist after the briefing, Weissman declined to reveal the names or locations of those being targeted. He said that “a handful” of letters were being sent to the society members in question, who would have about a month to respond.

Quackbusters

The ISSCR’s move against rogue members follows its launch of a website to help prospective patients spot bogus clinics. Members of the public can submit clinics for review via the website; the ISSCR will follow up to determine whether each clinic has a bona-fide medical ethics committee, and whether it is supervised by an official regulatory body such as the US Food and Drug Administration or the European Medicines Agency. Clinics that fail these tests will be named on the website.

Concern about clinics offering unproven treatments reached a crescendo this week with the news that a woman who had been treated for a kidney condition at a clinic in Thailand had died, apparently as a result of the stem-cell injections she received.