Patients Sue Korean Stem-Cell Company

Six patients in California are suing a stem-cell company for allegedly misleading them about the effectiveness of its stem-cell treatments. David Cyranoski, writing in Newsblog, reports that the patients, who are reported to be elderly and who live in California, are suing Human Biostar, a firm based in Sugar Land, Texas; Jin Han Hong, the company’s chief operating officer’ and Jeong Chan Ra, a Korean citizen and chairman of the board of Seoul-based RNL Bio, the parent company of Human Biostar. Cyranoski claims that this is the first case in which patients have brought suit against a prominent stem-cell company.

The six patients claim they were sold the procedures by Hong when he was president of RNL Life Science, another subsidiary of RNL Bio, based in Los Angeles. The procedure consists of taking fat from a patient, removing stem cells from the sample, processing and expanding them in RNL’s Seoul laboratory, and then sending them to one of RNL’s clinics to inject into patients to treat a variety of diseases.

According to Cyranoski, one patient said that he was given an injection in South Korea, where the treatment is not approved, and then told to keep it a secret. All other injections were reportedly at clinics either in China or Tijuana. At the Tijuana clinic, five of the six claimed to have received an injection on the same day in September 2010.

The patients claim that at RNL workshops they were misled into believing that treatments, still in the experimental stage, had already been proved effective. Cyranoski notes that altogether there are seven legal complaints, including intentional misrepresentation of fact, negligent misrepresentation of fact, false advertising, unfair competition, negligence and breach of implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing. The seventh claim is “financial elder abuse, ” a special clause in California’s Welfare and Institutions Code meant to protect the elderly from being defrauded.