Stem cell beauty treatment 'can be fatal'

Millionaires who undergo animal stem cell therapy to erase wrinkles at beauty clinics or treat several diseases could die from sudden cardiovascular system failure, a health expert warned yesterday.

"Some patients might go into [anaphylactic] shock after receiving several doses of animal stem cells especially those who have hypersensitive reactions," said Dr Tanom Bunaprasert, an assistant professor at Chulalongkorn University's Medical School.

The Internet, television and print media are full of advertisements for animal stem cell therapies that give people a more youthful look.

In the belief that such treatment could remove all facial wrinkles - the sign of ageing - people cough up Bt100,000Bt1 million per session.

"The feeling of a younger face and fresher skin is caused by the placebo effect, not the stem cells that are injected into their faces," Tanom said.

There is no scientifically approved mechanism for animal stem cells to be used in human treatment. Animal stem cell therapy is prohibited and illegal in all developed countries today.

The injection of animal stem cells is a freshxenograft transplantation, which is a potent foreign antigen to the human immune system. Serial injections of animal stem cells into the human body stimulates the immune system into producing alloantibodies to reject the future transplanted organ. 

Alloantibodies will quickly destroy the following dose of animal stem cells. Someone injected with animal stem cells who then receives an organ transplant, such as a kidney or liver, will face a very high risk of transplanted organ rejection. The memory of the immune system to xenogenic cells is lifelong.

Stem cells are not a magic drug or magic food, Tanom. Stem cells are not a chemical substance but just living cells and the benefit from such cells comes from their functioning when they are alive. Dead stem cells are useless, he said.

Stem cells are classified into several types, each different and suitable for each specific organ. It is not reasonable to use blood stem cells to rejuvenate the face and there is no approved evidence that they are helpful.

Stem cells cannot be used as a cream, lotion or serum because they will die and the product, which consists mainly of growth factors, has an extremely low amount of stem cells anyway.

These growth factors easily degrade within a few hours or days. Because of the large molecules, the growth factors almost never penetrate through intact skin.

"Stem cell food has very poor nutritious ingredients. You eat numerous stem cells every day for a long time from meat, chicken, fish and pork but you don't know it," he said.

To correct wrinkles temporarily, Botox is safe, but to fill all wrinkles on the human face, biodegradable fillers such as hyaluronic and collagen, which are approved by US Food and Drug Administration, are advised, he said.

The new trend of fillers is serial injections of autologous or allogenic fibroblast, which has been accepted by the US FDA for clinical trial phases 1-3, he added.