Paolo Bianco scrive, su Nature, che esistono due descrizioni delle staminali mesenchimali, una nella letteratura scientifica e una nelle “brochure” aziendali:
The marketing of MSCs as a cure-all is no coincidence — they have long been credited with potential performances that are beyond their biological limits… Suddenly, MSCs became ‘pluri-effective’ through intravenous infusions and release of chemical factors. Yet intravenously infused MSCs die rapidly and are quickly cleared from the body. As shown by 50 years of in vivo experiments, locally transplanted MSCs form bone. They do so, data show, even if transplanted into the heart or brain.
Some 300 clinical trials on MSC infusions have been, or are being, conducted worldwide. Their mere initiation, paradoxically, is used to suggest that intravenously infused MSCs can cure multiple unrelated diseases, which (to my knowledge) is not proven at this time. These statements, and the trials that fuel them, represent a new kind of advertisement within science. They can distort science and medicine, mislead the public, create illusions for patients, sabotage health-care systems and, above all, obstruct rather than accelerate the growth of science and the development of medicine from it.
This is a worldwide problem, highlighted by current events in Italy. A Brescia-based organization called the Stamina Foundation is promoting an unproven MSC therapy to vulnerable patients, including children with lethal neurological diseases… Stamina is backed by companies and a lobbying organization called the Cure Alliance, which has offices in Milan and Rome.
(Cure Alliance non c’entra con il Movimento Pro Stamina il cui “ufficio stampa” vuol confondere le acque. Camillo Ricordi, promotore della prima, ha fatto presente che “non è assolutamente favorevole alla deregolamentazione delle terapie cellulari come erroneamente riportato da alcuni organi di stampa”. Troppo tardi, quelli son dei professionisti della comunicazione aziendale.)
Central to the agenda of those who promote unproven therapies is an attack on the regulations surrounding such treatments, as well as the regulatory bodies that enforce them. Bone-marrow transplantation, some say, would never have been developed under today’s stringent regulations. But bone-marrow transplantation was never a commercial product, and it developed when no one was out to sell stem cells directly to patients and ahead of proof.
… Claiming the right to market products ahead of proof of efficacy can only bring ineffective products to market, degrade medicine and impoverish all except, perhaps, the fortunate sellers.