SOME Chinese biotech companies appear to be marketing their services to desperate families, offering implausible and controversial stem cell treatments for childhood blindness and other neurological disorders.
The companies give customers umbilical cord stem cells, costing tens of thousands of dollars, in the hope of treating otherwise incurable diseases. But Lawrence Tychsen and Greg Lueder, both paediatric ophthalmologists at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, are sceptical.
The companies target one childhood disease in particular – optic nerve hypoplasia, in which the optic nerve fails to develop properly, resulting in blindness from birth. The pair say it is implausible that…
