http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/008200801111921.htm

Spinal cord injury treatment through Stem Cell therapy
Coimbatore (PTI): After curing a heart patient through stem cell therapy, a city hospital has treated a 38-year old woman of spinal cord injuries using the same system.

The woman had sustained a spinal cord injury, following a road accident, resulting in paralysis below the neck, without any movement in the limbs, Dr G Bhaktavasalam, Chairman, K G Hospital, told reporters here on Friday.

After performing MRI, CT Scan and X-ray, she was diagnosed to have 'cervical cord injury' with a fracture of the neck bone, he said.

Bone marrow stem cells were processed from the patient and were separated at Nichi-in Centre for Regenerative Medicine, Chennai and flown back to the hospital,he said.

The surgery was performed yesterday and the woman recovering in the ICU, he said.

The cervical cord was already exposed and the bone marrow stem cells were injected into the spinal cord and the neck bones were stabilised using metal plate screws.

The cells taken from the patient had shown that there was no immunological rejection,he said.

Hollywood Actor Christopher Reeve had same type of ailment in 1995 and if the stem cell transplantation treatment would have been available at that time, he could have been saved, Bhaktavatsalam claimed.

Researchers ask: Is China the sleeping giant of biotech?

PARIS (AFP) — China's biotech sector accounts for just a sliver of its pharmaceutical industry and operates under the cloud of a massive review of licenses issued under a regulator executed last year for accepting bribes.

Even so, experts say, Chinese purveyors of genetically engineered drugs and vaccines -- targeting everything from cancer to Alzheimer's -- are growing at a frenzied pace and are likely to become major actors on the world stage.

"There is no question that the sector is established," said Peter Singer of the McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health in Toronto who was lead researcher of a study published Monday in Nature Biotechnology.

"What we found really surprising is that in an industry that's only 10 years old, China has innovative products on the market," he told AFP

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China Offers Unproven Medical Treatments
By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN and ALAN SCHER ZAGIER

BEIJING (AP) — They're paralyzed from diving accidents and car crashes, disabled by Parkinson's, or blind. With few options available at home in America, they search the Internet for experimental treatments — and often land on Web sites promoting stem cell treatments in China.

They mortgage their houses and their hometowns hold fundraisers as they scrape together the tens of thousands of dollars needed for travel and the hope for a miracle cure.

A number of these medical tourists claim some success when they return home:

Jim Savage, a Houston man with paralysis from a spinal cord injury, says he can move his right arm. Penny Thomas of Hawaii says her Parkinson's tremors are mostly gone. The parents of 6-year-old Rylea Barlett of Missouri, born with an optical defect, say she can see.

But documentation is mostly lacking, and Western doctors warn that patients are serving as guinea pigs in a country that isn't doing the rigorous lab and human tests that are needed to prove a treatment is safe and effective.

Noting the lack of evidence, three Western doctors, undertook their own limited study. It involved seven patients with spinal cord injuries who chose to get fetal brain tissue injections at one hospital in China. The study reported "no clinically useful improvements" — even though most patients believed they were better. Five developed complications such as meningitis.

Experts in the West have theories about why some people think they've improved when the evidence is thin. Some are often getting intensive physical therapy, along with the mysterious injections; the placebo effect may also be a factor.