Pluristem: Second Patient With ‘Life-Saving’ Cells Died
By David Wainer,
Business Week
| 11. 09. 2012
Pluristem Therapeutics Inc. (PSTI) said a second of the three patients given the company’s experimental stem cells has died after Pluristem touted the treatments as “life-saving.”
Pluristem shares soared after the Haifa, Israel-based company issued news releases in May, August and September announcing the treatments. Pluristem raised $34 million in a share sale in September without announcing that the first of those patients, a 7-year-old girl with a bone-marrow disease, had died. The company issued a press release today acknowledging the death of a second patient, though it wouldn’t say when the death occurred.
Pluristem sank the most in 21 months in Nasdaq Stock Market trading yesterday after Bloomberg News reported Pluristem hadn’t disclosed the girl’s death before the share sale. The company said today it wasn’t aware of her death at the time of the offering.
“The pediatric patient referred to in the Bloomberg article survived for six months, another patient survived for four months, and the third is still alive,” the company said in today’s statement. “Pluristem believes that these results exceeded longevity expectations. The unfortunate...
Related Articles
By Karin Hammarberg and Catherine Mills, BioNews | 10.13.2025
The Australian fertility industry has been rocked by several recent cases of embryo and sperm mix-ups. With a lack of transparency about what clinics do to prevent such errors recurring, trust and confidence in the industry and how it is...
By Rob Stein, NPR | 09.30.2025
Scientists have created human eggs containing genes from adult skin cells, a step that someday could help women who are infertile or gay couples have babies with their own genes but would also raise difficult ethical, social and legal issues...
By Daniel Hildebrand, The Humanist | 10.01.2025
When most people hear the word eugenics, they think of dusty history textbooks and black-and-white photographs: forced sterilizations in the early 20th century, pseudoscientific charts measuring skulls, the language of “fitness” used to justify violence and exclusion. It feels like...
By Claire Robinson, GMWatch | 09.29.2025
According to an article on BBC News, the Quadram Institute in Norwich is recruiting 76 people with low vitamin D to take part in the ViTaL-D Study, where some participants will eat soup containing tomatoes that have been genetically...