Stem Cell Rip-off; Moscow beauty salons are offering bogus stem-cell treatments for wrinkles, gray hair and other so-called ailments.

Byline: Nadya Titova and Frank Brown

Vladimir Bryntsalov, a Moscow pharmaceutical tycoon, decided last year on the advice of a friend to seek a treatment for the gray hair and wrinkles that come with being 58 years old. He had a potent mixture of human embryonic stem cells injected under his skin. It is a radical procedure with unpredictable results under any circumstances, let alone in a Moscow beauty salon. A few weeks later, Bryntsalov was as gray, wrinkled and tired as ever--and sported several pea-size tumors on his face. He began to doubt that the salon was legitimate. "They didn't have a laboratory, nothing," he says. "Who knows where [the stem cells] came from?"

Welcome to the frontiers of stem-cell therapy. Much of the world's collective medical intellect is being trained on these little cells, which appear in their purest, most powerful form in the first few days of a developing embryo. They have the unique power to turn into any type of cell found in the human body. Because they're so controversial, proponents have taken to hyping their promise as a medical treatment. The message that seems to have gotten through to people like Vladimir Bryntsalov is this: stem cells are the key to curing incurable human ailments. And if stem cells might fix spinal-cord injuries and Parkinson's, think what they'll do for baldness!

Stem cells, of course, are a long way from curing anything--treatments are at present largely theoretical. But that hasn't stopped about 50 beauty salons and medical clinics in Moscow from using stem cells in a variety of cosmetic treatments and other remedies, often under the guise of medical research. They operate unregulated by the government and often without adequate medical supervision. Many of them don't even take medical histories from patients, much less follow up on possible complications. By some accounts, those complications can be severe: tumors, depressed immune systems and blood infections. And the treatments have virtually no scientific or medical merit. In the worst case, stem-cell injections "have clear potential to grow into a malignant tumor," says Dr. Timothy Hardingham of the Centre for Tissue Engineering in Manchester, England. At best, the Russian doctors' practices are "close to witchcraft."

The clinics claim to be able to cure wrinkles, hair loss, dry skin and some dental problems by injecting what are claimed to be cultures of stem cells, taken from human embryos, under the skin. Some clinics cultivate patients' own adult stem cells--typically found in bone marrow or fat, they are much more limited in their ability to morph into other types of cells--and then inject them intravenously. A 50-year-old American woman suffering from anxiety and sleeplessness traveled to Moscow last month to Stem Cell Higher Technologies Inc. for her second $15,000 treatment in two years. It's a big expense on her $65,000-a-year salary, but "within two months of the first treatment I could finally rest normally," she says. "I could finally concentrate again at work."

Are the benefits worth the risks? In the absence of scientific studies there's no way of knowing. The American patient could be experiencing a miracle cure or a placebo effect. The risks could be significant. Aside from the possibility of infection, nobody really knows what stem cells do when placed among the tissues of the human body. No clinical trials have been done on stem cells as a treatment for wrinkles.

In a sense, Moscow is now running the world's biggest clinical trial of stem-cell therapy for cosmetic purposes. But any result is inherently suspect: in a true clinical trial, doctors would be gathering data according to a well-designed research plan. That's hardly the case in Moscow. Following a ...