other hospitals offering untested treatments, Beike made no guarantee of positive results, and the patient’s atrophy continued to progress, after short-term improvement that was ascribed to the physiotherapy she received in conjunction with the stem cell injections.
Prior to the institution of new regulations in 2012, the legal infrastructure surrounding stem cell therapies in China was so uncertain that science journal Nature reported in 2010 that during its investigation into Beike Biotech, chief executive Alex Moffett requested that the journal direct him to any formal applications for Ministry of Health approval for his company, since he was unaware of whether they existed. While investigations in years previous of other Chinese government agencies had uncovered numerous problems with corruption, in the case of Chinese stem cell treatments, corruption simply wasn’t necessary because there were too few official obstacles in their way.
Medical tourism has threatened the reputation of Chinese research, by conflating all Chinese stem cell work with the unproven therapies unscrupulous institutions sell to wealthy Westerners. The recent regulations have been an attempt to respond to this, although the repercussions for violating them are mild. Under the regulations, stem cell therapy is categorized as “category 3 medical technology,” the same category as sex-reassignment surgery, gene therapy, and surgical treatment of mental illness. Medical institutions offering category 3 treatments must first demonstrate their effectiveness in clinical trials, as well as the safety of their protocols and procedures. However, the fines for noncompliance can be as little as a few hundred dollars.
In 2013, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles conducted a study on children with optic nerve hypoplasia who had received stem cell therapies in China. Interestingly, the study was requested in part by Beike, who needed to test the efficacy of its therapy in order to comply with new Chinese regulations. Optic nerve hypoplasia is the leading cause of pediatric blindness in the West, as well as the only cause of pediatric blindness that is becoming more common: an effective treatment for it would indeed be a medical breakthrough. The Children’s Hospital study compared 10 children who received stem cell therapy from Beike with controls. The Beike patients received six infusions of mesenchymal stem cells over 16 days, and daily infusions of related medications. No improvement to visual acuity, optic nerve size, or pupil response to light was found one month, three months, or nine months after treatment.
In 2009, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Shanghai Jiao Tong University produced fertile mice from inducible pluripotent cells, which offered the possibility of conducting stem cell research without embryos, and of growing replacement organs from a patient’s tissue sample. Further research on making induced pluripotent stem cells as versatile as embryonic stem cells was pursued at Peking University and published in a 2013 paper in Science. The method uses chemical injection rather than the gene insertion method previously in use. Ten thousand small molecules were screened in search of a combination that would be as effective as gene insertion without introducing new complications. Small molecules have the benefit of passing easily through cell walls without affecting the immune system. Because they can easily be synthesized and standardized, they’re also cost-effective. Screening and fine-tuning took several years before a cocktail of seven small compounds was shown to convert.2 percent of adult tissue cells into inducible pluripotent stem cells, the same conversion rate found in gene insertion. As of the paper’s publication, work had only been done on mice, and work remained to be done to demonstrate the utility of the process with human tissue.
Stem cell research has been instrumental in reversing some of the brain drain China has experienced in the past. Brain drain is a phenomenon commonly experienced in the developing world as well as in less prosperous or urban regions within the developed world, in which local young men and women, educated at local expense, leave for the West (or within the West, for the big cities) either to continue their education or to pursue a job that pays better or offers better opportunities than they can find at home. Brain drain can slow the progress made in improving the scientific community and research infrastructure of a country, as the best students keep leaving for other countries instead of remaining and continuing to contribute to the growing community. In China’s case, new investments in stem cell research have led Chinese-born scientists who had been working or educated abroad to return to China to pursue their research. Joy Zhang, in her work The Cosmopolitanization of Science, uses Chinese stem cell research—and the boom in Asian biotech in general—as an example of the way “globalization” is not always “westernization.” “The development of China’s stem cell research,” she argues, “exhibits neither linear globalization as ‘China becoming the West’ nor simple globalization as ‘global research with Chinese characteristics.’ Rather, it is a cross-border dialectic process in which existing Chinese characteristics are being reiterated and transformed. Concurrently, this transformation from a developing country alters the global research paradigm” (Zhang, p. 3).
Bill Kte’pi
Independent Scholar
See Also: Beike Biotechnology; Japan; Korea; Peking University; Taiwan.
Further Readings
Aldhous, Peter. “China Attempts to Halt Unproven Stem Cell Therapies.” New Scientist, January 11, 2012. http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2012/01/china-halts-new-stem-cell-tria.html.
Brown, Carolyn. “Stem Cell Tourism Poses Risks.” Canadian Medical Association Journal, v.184/2 (February 2012).
Dennis, Carina. “China: Stem Cells Rise in the East.” Nature, v.419 (2002).
Fink, Cassandra, Pamela Garcia-Filion, and Mark Borchert. “Failure of Stem Cell Therapy to Improve Vision in Children With Optic Nerve Hypoplasia.” Journal of AAPOS, October 2013.
Liao, Lianming, Lingsong Li, and Robert Chunhua Zhao. “Stem Cell Research in China.” Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society, v.362/1482 (June 29, 2007).
Qiu, Jane. “China Special: The Backbone of Spinal Research.” New Scientist, v.2629 (November 7, 2007).
Shirk, Susan L. China: Fragile Superpower. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
“US Stem Cell Research in Robust Health.” New Scientist, July 13, 2011. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128212.800-us-stem-cell-research-in-robust-health.html.
“Wild East or Scientific Feast?” The Economist, January 14, 2010. http://www.economist.com/node/15268869.
Xie, Xiaojie and Jian-an Wang, eds. Mesenchymal Stem Cells for the Heart: From Bench to Bedside (Advanced Topics in Science and Technology in China). New York: Springer, 2009.
Zhang, Joy Yueyue. The Cosmopolitanization of Science: Stem Cell Governance in China. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
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There are two types of stem cells: adult stem cells and embryonic stem cells. Adult stem cell research is decades old and has shown the efficacy of stem cell treatment for autoimmune diseases, heart disease, leukemia, and cancer. Adult stem cells are harvested from blood, brain, or skin tissue, body fat, and living bone marrow, as well as umbilical cord blood and placental tissue. For Christians left and right the matter is settled, not a matter of controversy. Adult stem cells are good, and research should continue, perhaps accelerate. However, there is major controversy over the use of embryonic stem cells, those harvested from human embryos in a process that entails destruction of the embryo.
Pro-abortion