Overselling medical progress

Overselling the significance of medical research is a familiar problem in the media, with scientists and journalists both being culpable.  There’s a dramatic example going on at the moment, where Pluristem Therapeutics, who made available their in-development treatment on compassionate grounds to three patients, issued press releases with titles such as “Compassionate Use of Pluristem’s PLX Cells Saves the Life of a Child After Bone Marrow Transplantation Failure.” The child died six months later.  One of the other two patients has also died.

Bloomberg News is the main source for this story, and they focused on the impact on share prices and whether the reporting might have violated stock-market regulations, which an expert quoted in the story says is a grey area, and the company denies:

The Haifa, Israel-based company doesn’t follow patients after they are released from the hospital and wasn’t obligated to report the girl’s death, he said.

“What counts legally is whether there is an improvement in the physical condition,” Aberman said in a telephone interview with Bloomberg News. “When we saw significant improvement in the blood count, we declared a successful treatment.”

Even assuming that excitement with the progress of their new treatment was the only factor in the press releases, the whole miracle-cure thing is irresponsible.  Leigh Turner, a bioethicist from Minnesota, (in a blog interview) said it well:

There are some valuable lessons here both for reporters as well as for consumers of news coverage of stem cell research and other areas of science that are routinely overhyped. Whose interests are served when press releases are issued? Is there something significant about timing of press releases? Are independent voices included in news coverage or do all quoted individuals have vested interests in promoting positive account of study results? Why is a press release being issued if results are based upon a single research participant or merely a few research subjects? And finally, what financial interests are swirling beneath the language of “miracles”, “cures”, and “lifesaving” interventions? These are questions reporters should ask and they are also questions those of us who read and otherwise consume the news should consider whenever we are confronted with dramatic claims floated on anecdotes, testimonials, and research “findings” based on meaningless sample sizes.

Pluristem’s work, with placental stem cells, is promising, and they have actual clinical trials starting and planned. That’s how we will be able to tell whether the treatments help patients, and that is what might be worth reporting. (via)