A stem cell or bone marrow transplant replaces damaged blood cells with healthy ones. It can be used to treat conditions that affect blood cells. It can be used to treat conditions that affect blood cells, such as leukemia and lymphoma. Now, the National Health Service will fund curative stem cell transplants for adult patients with thalassemia for the first time, following the new guidelines.
Last week it was announced that a new gene-edited stem cell therapy for beta thalassemia would begin to be available on the NHS. The HSCT is available on the NHS. For now, it's only considered for people who meet very specific medical criteria. In a few weeks it will be offered at seven highly specialized NHS centers across the country, and the therapy will be manufactured in the UK. While significant investment has been made in research on the clinical applications of stem cells (in fact, the UK clinical trial portal (UKCTG, 201) contained 191 stem cell therapy trials that recruited staff at the time of writing this article, the vast majority of proposed therapies are not supported by existing scientific evidence (Sipp, 201).
In the United Kingdom, the National Health Service (NHS) largely sets standards for accepted medical treatments. It only offers hematopoietic stem cell transplants (derived from bone marrow or blood) as part of some treatments for cancer and blood disorders (such as leukemia, lymphoma, and sickle cell disease). Recently, some National Health Service hospitals have also started offering transplants of hematopoietic stem cells for some diseases. These include relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis, which fails in approved alternative treatment, albeit with strict criteria for access, inclusion and exclusion to treatment (NHS, 201).
These new uses apply well-established treatment protocols to bone marrow and blood transplantation, rather than new treatment protocols. According to companies dedicated to stem cell therapy, the transformation can be achieved, among other things, by investing in experimental stem cell therapies. We identified 71 websites of companies that market purported stem cell therapies online directly to consumers and 106 individual centers across the UK where therapies are administered. While anti-aging therapies are disproportionately aimed at women, several therapies related to hair restoration are also aimed at men.
According to the findings of Turner and Knoepfler (201) in the U.S. In the US, many UK companies advertise platelet-rich plasma (PRP) therapies as a form of stem cell or stem cell-based therapy. Most UK companies use the stem cell therapy label to market therapies based on what are called adipose or fat stem cells (20 companies). Many companies (2) did not specify the biological origin of stem cells, but they made generic statements about stem cell therapy or treatment, or about therapies that they claimed to promote or rely on stem cells.
Promising descriptions of stem cell therapy promoted by commercial companies are often related to marketing strategies that set aside potential concerns about safety and efficacy. of experimental therapies.
