Untested, unproven, and unethical: the promotion and provision of autologous stem cell therapies in Australia.

An increasing number of private clinics in Australia are marketing and providing autologous stem cell therapies to patients. Although advocates point to the importance of medical innovation and the primacy of patient choice, these arguments are unconvincing. First, it is a stark truth that these clinics are flourishing while the efficacy and safety of autologous stem cell therapies, outside of established indications for hematopioetic stem cell transplantation, are yet to be shown.

The emergence and popularisation of autologous somatic cellular therapies in Australia: therapeutic innovation or regulatory failure?

Private stem cell clinics throughout Australia are providing autologous stem cell therapies for a range of chronic and debilitating illnesses despite the lack of published literature to support the clinical application of these therapies. The Therapeutic Goods Administration has excluded autologous stem cell therapies from its regulatory domain leaving such therapies to be regulated by the same mechanisms that regulate research, such as the National Health and Medical Research Council Research Ethics Guidelines, and clinical practice, such as the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency. However, the provision of these stem cell therapies does not follow the established pathways for legitimate medical advance--therapeutic innovation or research.

Trade-offs in resource allocation in the intracellular life-cycle of hepatitis C virus.

Positive sense single-stranded RNA viruses undergo three mutually exclusive processes to replicate within a cell. These are translation to produce proteins, replication to produce RNA viral genomes, and packaging to form virions. The allocation of newly synthesised viral genomes to these processes, which can be regarded as life-history traits, may be subject to natural selection for efficient reproduction.