Dr. D gets cell therapy – Jail cell, that is.
One of the extra sordid characters in the sordid planet of stem cell pseudomedicine, Richard D’Andrea, who was known to lots of of his patients as “Dr D,” was arrested more than the holiday season, and a warrant was issued for his partner in crime, John Wood. Both guys posed as licensed remedy facilities in an try to bilk seriously ill patients out of tens of thousands of dollars, a scheme that apparently netted him and his co-conspirators $1.5 million. The case has been attracting widespread media consideration for a number of factors. Initially, Dr D’Andrea and John Wood were previously outed as frauds in spectacular style by a investigative plan on CBS final year.
The show featured a hidden camera segment in which Dr Richard D’andrea made various false statements to the parents of a youngster with autism, soon after which Dr D’Andrea and John Wood were confronted by a reporter. While John Wood stoically tried to justify the scam, Dr Richard D’Andrea all but gnawed off a leg in his efforts to squirm out from below the spotlight
Richard D’Andrea was absolutely nothing if not a prolific collaborator, a single who tended to gravitate toward the lowest frequent denominator in the fringe medical community. Besides Margolis, who remains a fugitive, Dr D’Andrea served as a go-to cell injector for Adistem Technologies, another purveyor of stem cell flim-flam, and co-authored a notorious function of speculative fiction/promoting bumpf that waved its arms furiously in postulating a role for stem cells in the therapy of autism (preferably at a single of the South Asian clinics operated at the time by the paper’s principal authors).
Justice Finally Catches up with Richard D’Andrea
A second exciting element of the case is the reality that 1 of Dr D’Andrea collaborators, Dr Zannos Grekos, was working in academia, at the Medical University in Australia even though they processed cells for unapproved clinical makes use of. This seems to have been coordinated by Don Margolis, who was federally charged with associated crimes last summer time. A current commentary by In The Know Media referred to as for responsible scientists to take a much more cautious method when sharing cell resources, due to the threat of inappropriate uses by stem cell scammers like Dr Richard D’Andrea. But in this case, it appears Dr D was far more willing accomplice than unwitting dupe. The defendants have but to go to trial, and I’ll be very curious to see if the FBI’s dragnet hauls in any more stem cell charlatans. This certainly isn’t the only case out there of an academic with overt ties to a “stem cell tourism” outfit…
Dr Richard D’Andreas criminal investigation puts a period to a long and inglorious profession in medical pretense. In addition to stem cells, he also styled himself as a guru of such far-out modalities as marijuana legalization, oxygen therapy, chelation, and photodynamic therapy, and his sole medical degree was from a diploma mill in the South America. He got on the incorrect finish of a class action suit, when he worked with Adistem (a biotech corporation that now seems to be out of business following SEC and other complaints) to defraud a multiple sclerosis patient by selling her vials that they claimed contained the experimental drug SF-109, but which actually contained the somewhat far more ordinary molecule, H2O.
2011 was a fateful year for amoral stem cell entrepreneurs, with various arrests, clinic closures, and crucial investigations. Here’s hoping for extra of the identical in 2012.
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