The decision of Italy government to permit unproven stem cell therapy for terminally-ill patients has come under the fire of scientists who believe that such therapies are harmful.
Last year, Italian medicines regulator AIFA issued a ban on tis therapy after it inspected the laboratories triggering legal contests by families of patients under treatment.
However, Health Minister permitted a terminally ill child to continue using the Stamina treatment after hearing the emotional pleas of her parents in March. On March 21, an official decree was issued by the Health Ministry permitting 32 patients including children to continue the treatment.
On Thursday European scientists in their release criticized the decree as "riding roughshod over existing European licensing criteria”. They said it is not proved that the therapies are effective in real sense.
Charles French-Constant from the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Regenerative Medicine said,"These unproven and ill-prepared stem cell therapies, for which there is no scientific basis, will do nothing for patients and their families except make them poorer,”
Those who favour the therapy say exact regulations tend to support the big drug companies, but scientists contend that Stamina’s treatment is undocumented and chancy. Rallies were held by the supporters of this therapy demanding for it to be made available to anyone suffering from an incurable disease which has no treatment elsewhere.
"This creates a dangerous precedent," and anyone could use media pressure and take advantage of patients’ hopes of fudging normal evidence-based techniques.
Stem cells are the body’s mother cells and can self-renew or multiply and have ability to renovate into any type of body cell.
Stem cell therapy is done by introducing new adult stem cells into damaged tissue to treat disease. Though, a number of therapies exist at the experimental stage only.
Several judges presiding over the cases brought by the families of under-tretment patients ruled that the Stamina treatment should be made available under a law that permits the use of unproven therapies for those patients who are at the verge of death.
However, scientists alerted that a complication or death by such an untested therapy could become a hurdle for the progression of all stem cell therapies under investigation.
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