HOUSTON (CN) — Injected with 600 million stem cells grown from his own stomach fat, an elderly man said the injections stopped his Parkinson’s disease tremors and he’s now teeing up his own golf balls and competing in golf tournaments.
A teenager said stem cell infusions stabilized his eye condition so he could stop taking a chemotherapy drug that was sapping his energy, and stem cells sprayed up his nose to his brain stem improved his comprehension of Spanish.
Both are clients of Celltex Therapeutics, a Houston company at the forefront of the controversial, but flourishing, regenerative medicine industry, profiting from treatments that researchers hope could one day treat Alzheimer’s and Lou Gehrig’s disease and help paralyzed people walk again.
Though experts say it could take decades to develop stem cell treatments for these diseases, Celltex is one of more than 350 businesses in the United States marketing treatments that are not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, according to a 2016 study by professors at the University of California, Davis and the University of Minnesota.
Like Celltex, some of these companies provide treatments for sick people who have run out of options and are willing to pay big bucks for relief — federal approval be damned.
Texas Connection and Retreat to Mexico
Celltex is unique among its competitors in that it was founded at the suggestion of Texas Governor Rick Perry, now the U.S Secretary of Energy.
Perry summoned his longtime friend and campaign donor David Eller to his office in the State Capitol in Austin, after Eller returned to Texas from a stint as president of DuPont Pharmaceuticals in London.
“Well, I’d known Perry since he was 18, so it wasn’t like going to the governor’s office,” Eller said. “When I walked in he said, ‘Are you too old to do one more gig?’ And I said, ‘What kind of gig are you talking about?’”
Perry said he wanted to leave a legacy for the state because he was tired of Texans having to go to Japan or German for stem cell therapy.
Perry asked him to start a stem cell business in Texas, Eller said, but he was hesitant to agree because the federal government frowns upon experimental procedures.
“So I say, ‘OK, Rick, let me see, what about the federal government?’ He said what a Texan would want to hear a governor say: ‘The hell with the federal government. Texas has its own constitution, by God we can do whatever we want to.’
“So that’s the way it started,” Eller said.
“Perry said, ‘If you will do this, I’ll get a law passed in Texas to make it legal.’ And he did. That was 2011. So for a year and a half it was legal. You could be in Seattle or anywhere, but you had to be in Texas to get it done.”
Eller co-founded Celltex with Dr. Stanley Jones, a Houston orthopedic surgeon and also a longtime friend of Perry. Jones injected Perry with stem cells during a July 2011 spinal surgery he performed on the governor.