TIJUANA, Mexico — Maggie Alejos arrived here in June from St. Anne, Ill., with her husband, her daughter and a cashier's check for $13,500, payable to the Regenerative Medicine Institute.
Rail-thin, with an oxygen tube anchored above her upper lip, Ms. Alejos, a retired Army nurse, has coped with emphysema for a dozen of her 65 years. Once she came close enough to a lung transplant that doctors prepared her for surgery, only to discover that the donor lung was unfit.
At a hospital here, doctors affiliated with the institute extracted about seven ounces of fat from her thighs, hoping to harvest about 130 million stem cells and implant them in her failing lungs.
Across the Internet — where Ms. Alejos learned about the Tijuana institute — adult stem cells are promoted as a cure for everything from sagging skin to severed spinal cords.
On the surface, the claim is plausible. Scientists have discovered that fat, bone marrow and other parts of the body contain stem cells, immature cells that can rejuvenate themselves, at least in the tissue they are naturally found.
But it has yet to be proved that these cells can regenerate no matter where they are placed, or under what conditions this might occur. Moreover, questions about safety remain unanswered.
These sober realities do not appear to have slowed the rise of an international industry catering to customers who may pay tens of thousands of dollars in cash for their shot at a personal miracle. (Some foreign operators offer creative variations on the theme, like cells from sharks and sheep.)
Domestic providers, too, can push the limits. In July, for example, a former pathologist at the Medical University of South Carolina pleaded guilty to illegally processing and shipping stem cells for treatment without approval from the university or the Food and Drug Administration.
The number of clinics and products has reached the point that scientists fear repercussions for their own work. Dr. Hesham Sadek of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, who is studying heart muscle regeneration, worries that the marketing deluge now makes it hard for patients to tell science from swindle, and all that lies on the spectrum in between.
"It really has the potential to undermine the legitimacy of the whole field," he said.
Trial or Treatment?
Even though Tijuana has perhaps 20 clinics offering adult stem cell therapy, Dr. Javier Lopez, founder of the Regenerative Medicine Institute, says it is his that has become "the poster company to knock down."
Born and educated in Tijuana, he has lived and worked across the border, in San Diego, for more than 30 years, mainly as a health care administrator. He became inspired by stem cells after accompanying a physician friend to a conference in Palm Springs, Calif., in 2008.
"It was eye-opening," he said. "I immediately thought, 'This is the future of medicine, and I want to be a part of it.' "
He says he runs the institute within the accepted framework of clinical trials: Patients sign consent forms acknowledging that the treatment is experimental. Studies are registered with the National Library of Medicine in the United States.
Being accepted for treatment requires more than cash. Protocols and procedures are approved by the institutional review board, or I.R.B., at Hospital Angeles Tijuana, and are administered by physicians at the hospital. "The focus of our trial, from Day 1, has been safety," Dr. Lopez said.
Still, skeptics in the United States are not convinced. Leigh Turner, a bioethicist at the University of Minnesota, says the Regenerative Medicine Institute blurs the boundary between trial and treatment.
The institute's patient consent form "would not pass muster with a competent American I.R.B.," Dr. Turner said, and the testimonials on its Web site place the emphasis squarely on results.
Moreover, studying patients who pay undermines the trials' scientific validity, Dr. Turner said. The patient sample is skewed toward those with the means to travel, and their financial investment may amplify an already strong placebo effect.
Dr. Lopez says that scientists in Mexico lack the government research support available in the United States, leaving establishments like his no choice but to charge patients.
He agrees that many stem cell providers are dubious, and says he works with the Mexican authorities to try to establish uniform standards. As for his own institute, he said, "I'm very proud of what we are doing," and added, "I get upset when people start talking trash about what is done south of the border."
A Gray Area
In the United States, too, it is easy to conduct business outside government oversight, said Dr. George Q. Daley, who studies stem cells for blood diseases at Harvard Medical School. Close down one shady operation, he went on, and more seem to randomly pop up.
Even questionable publicity does not necessarily hurt business. Regnocyte, a company in Florida, posted an unflattering CNN report about it on its Web site under the heading "special coverage."
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