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 Carl Zimmer, The New York Times | 06.04.2026
Scientists at Columbia University have edited the DNA of early human embryos with unprecedented accuracy, an achievement that could open the way to babies engineered with particular characteristics.
The prospect has fueled controversy for years. On the one hand, the...
By Alexandre Piquard, Le Monde [cites CGS' Katie Hasson] | 05.22.2026
"If proven to be safe, we believe preventive gene editing could be one of the most important health technologies of the century." This is how Lucas Harrington explained the goal of his company Preventive: to create genetically modified babies. Trying...
By Daniel Shanahan, Los Angeles Review of Books | 05.31.2026
This is the 15th installment in the Legacies of Eugenics series, which features essays by leading thinkers devoted to exploring the history of eugenics and the ways it shapes our present. You can read the first part here. The series...
By Sofia Resnick, Stateline | 05.20.2026
An anti-abortion group last month sued seven Utah fertility clinics, claiming their disposal of embryos as part of the in vitro fertilization process violates the state’s wrongful death law.
The ministry Voice for the Voiceless believes it has a strong...