SOME Chinese biotech companies appear to be marketing their services to desperate families, offering implausible and controversial stem cell treatments for childhood blindness and other neurological disorders.
The companies give customers umbilical cord stem cells, costing tens of thousands of dollars, in the hope of treating otherwise incurable diseases. But and Greg Lueder, both paediatric ophthalmologists at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, are sceptical.
The companies target one childhood disease in particular 鈥� , in which the optic nerve fails to develop properly, resulting in blindness from birth. The pair say it is implausible that stem cells would migrate selectively to the eye, transform into nerve cells and connect properly to the brain.
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Stem Cells 鈥� Learn more about the promise and the controversy in our cutting edge special report .
