Justice catches up with Richard D’Andrea
A second interesting element of the case is the reality that a single of Dr D’Andrea collaborators, Dr Zannos Grekos, was operating in academia, at the Medical University in Australia though they processed cells for unapproved clinical makes use of. This appears to have been coordinated by Don Margolis, who was federally charged with associated crimes final summer time. A current commentary by In The Know Media named for responsible scientists to take a a lot more cautious strategy when sharing cell resources, due to the risk of inappropriate utilizes by stem cell scammers like Dr Richard D’Andrea. But in this case, it appears Dr D was additional prepared accomplice than unwitting dupe. The defendants have yet to go to trial, and I’ll be extremely curious to see if the FBI’s dragnet hauls in any much more stem cell charlatans. This definitely isn’t the only case out there of an academic with overt ties to a “stem cell tourism” outfit…

One of the more sordid characters in the sordid planet of stem cell pseudomedicine, Richard D’Andrea, who was known to many 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 men posed as licensed treatment 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.five million. The case has been attracting widespread media attention for a quantity of causes. First, Dr D’Andrea and John Wood had been previously outed as frauds in spectacular fashion by a investigative system on CBS final year.

The show featured a hidden camera segment in which Dr Richard D’andrea made numerous false statements to the parents of a child with autism, just after which Dr D’Andrea and John Wood were confronted by a reporter. Whilst 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

Dr Richard D’Andreas criminal investigation puts a period to a lengthy and inglorious career 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 wrong finish of a class action suit, when he worked with Adistem (a biotech enterprise that now seems to be out of company following SEC and other complaints) to defraud a numerous sclerosis patient by selling her vials that they claimed contained the experimental drug SF-109, but which really contained the somewhat additional ordinary molecule, H2O.

2011 was a fateful year for amoral stem cell entrepreneurs, with numerous arrests, clinic closures, and crucial investigations. Here’s hoping for more of the similar in 2012.

Richard D’Andrea was absolutely nothing if not a prolific collaborator, one particular who tended to gravitate toward the lowest widespread 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, an additional purveyor of stem cell flim-flam, and co-authored a notorious perform of speculative fiction/marketing 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).