International Stem Cell Society Tracks 750 Adult Stem Cell Patient Cases

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Significant milestone reached for the ICMS as well as the field and promise of adult stem cell therapies

PORTLAND, OREGON. MARCH 31, 2011 – The International Cellular Medicine Society has accomplished a significant milestone through its Stem Cell Patient Treatment Registry. Today the Society announced that the ICMS Treatment Registry has reached over 750 patient cases being tracked. As a nonprofit organization dedicated to ensuring patient safety, facilitating physician education, and providing peer oversight, this level of oversight and transparency is a significant landmark for the for the field and promise of cell based medicine.

“Patient safety is the foundation of the ICMS,” said Ricardo Rodriguez, MD, a director of the ICMS and co-chair of the Medical Advisory Board. “Through best practice standards, clinic accreditation and now this sizeable pool of patient outcome and complication data, the ICMS has established itself as the premiere organization in advancing adult stem cell treatments that are based on the principals of good patient care.” Participation in the Treatment Registry is reserved for those clinics that meet the Society’s minimum standards and been reviewed by the ICMS Institutional Review Board.

The 750 patients have all received autologous adult stem cell treatments and have been tracked in the ICMS Treatment Registry, a secure, web-based data collection system that tracks patient-reported outcomes and complications from patient surveys and interviews at 3, 6, and 12 months, and 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 and 20 years after the treatment. The rate of complication from these treatments has been less than 2%, and no severe adverse events have been reported. “To have this number of patients and have a rate of complications this low speaks to the safety profile of self-donated cells,” said David Audley, the Executive Director of the ICMS.

While the ICMS has collected tremendous amounts of data, the organization is adamant about maintaining the privacy of the patients and the confidentiality of the treatment protocols. The data stored in the Registry, including the processes by which the cells are collected and administered, as well as specific patient outcomes, are secure, private and available only to the clinic, the patient and select reviewers of the ICMS. These reviewers, in turn, only access Registry data to evaluate protocols and audit patient outcomes, and are bound by strict confidentiality and nondisclosure agreements. Individual members of the ICMS have no access to either patient data or the confidential processes that clinics utilize to treat patients. The ICMS does not publish outcomes from specific clinics. The ICMS does, however, publish all unadjudicated complaints and findings resulting from investigations on reported severe adverse events.

The ICMS expects the number of patients tracked to increase rapidly and significantly with the recent launch of its Stem Cell Clinic Accreditation Program. As the field of cell based medicine continues to advance and the number of clinics offering stem cell treatments around the world grows, the need for the services of the ICMS as trusted and independent authority to collect patient data and evaluate clinics will expand.

More information about the ICMS Registry and Clinic Accreditation Program can be found at www.cellmedicinesociety.org/clinics

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About the INTERNATIONAL CELLULAR MEDICINE SOCIETY

The ICMS is a physician guided international 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to patient safety and the protection of the practice of medicine and physician education through the production of global guidelines for the practice of cell based medicine. The society maintains three websites, www.cellmedicinesociety.org, focused on adult stem cell education and awareness for physicians and researchers; www.stemcellwatch.com, a portal for patient education and the collection of complaints against stem cells clinics; and www.cellregistry.org, a re-implantation registry to track the long term outcomes of adult stem cell based procedures and therapies.