Controversial Stem-Cell Company Moves Treatment Out of the United States
By David Cyranoski,
Nature
| 01. 30. 2013
Celltex to send patients to Mexico.
US citizens who had pinned their hopes on a company being able to offer stem-cell treatments close to home will now need to travel a little farther. Celltex Therapeutics of Houston, Texas, stopped treating patients in the United States last year following a warning from regulators. A 25 January e-mail to Celltex customers indicates that the firm will now follow in the footsteps of many other companies offering unproven stem-cell therapies and send its patients abroad for treatment — but only to Mexico.
The stem-cell treatments offered by Celltex involved extracting adult stem cells from a patient, culturing them and then reinjecting them in a bid to replenish damaged tissue. It had been offering the treatment for more than a year — with one of its high-profile customers being Texas governor, Rick Perry — when the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
wrote to the company on 24 September 2012 advising it that the stem cells it harvested and grew were more than “minimally manipulated” during Celltex's procedures. As such, the FDA regarded the cells as drugs, which would require...
Related Articles
By Emma McDonald Kennedy
| 10.29.2026
At the beginning of Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s blockbuster documentary You Can See Everything, Billy Evans (partner of Theranos founder and convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes), says that they decided to do the film for one purpose: “radical transparency.” As they work on “Theranos 2.0,” Evans and Holmes want to show the public that she has been misunderstood –– painted as a liar and a fraud in the public imagination (and the courts) despite, as she claims in the...
By Jennifer Denbow, Guest Contributor
| 10.29.2026
Almost every day I am reminded that we are in the midst of a fertility panic. Whether it’s the Vice President exhorting Americans to have more babies or The New York Times running yet another story about the fertility cliff, fear about falling fertility rates is everywhere. While centrally concerned with declining rates of childbearing, Anna Louie Sussman’s new book, Inconceivable: The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty, is a welcome antidote to the panic.
Sussman has written...
By Anna Louie Sussman, The New Republic | 10.26.2026
There’s a certain kind of novel that’s not quite apocalyptic enough to be science fiction, but just far-fetched enough to be speculative. No one is from outer space; society has not yet been carved up into a hierarchy of groups...
By Gary Sernovitz, Bloomberg | 10.21.2026
Three years ago, at the age of 50, I found out I have dangerous genes. So in June, I went to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to see how they could be fixed. Among my 6 billion base pairs of DNA are two...