The state took action against Dr. Zannos Grekos because of the death of a 69-year-old breast cancer patient April 4, 2010, after undergoing the treatment at his Bonita Springs practice, at 9500 Bonita Beach Road, Suite 310.

BONITA SPRINGS — Dr. Zannos Grekos may not have an attorney representing him at a hearing next month against a state complaint that he performed an unauthorized stem cell procedure on a patient who later died.

Or maybe the Bonita Springs cardiologist will have new counsel for the three-day administrative hearing scheduled to begin March 20.

His original attorney, Greg Chaires of Orlando, withdrew from the case Jan. 24, less than two months before the hearing. He's been Grekos' attorney since the state filed an administrative complaint against the doctor a year ago.

Grekos couldn't be reached for comment at his practice, Regenocyte Therapeutic, 9500 Bonita Beach Road, Suite 310.

Chaires stated in his withdrawal notice to the judge that he had good cause to stop representing him, but didn't elaborate.

Florida health department spokeswoman Jennifer Hirst said this past week that Grekos has two weeks to hire a new attorney “and regardless of whether he does or not, the trial date will not change.”

The case, which stems from events in early 2010, culminated a year later on Feb. 22, 2011, when the health department imposed an emergency restriction against his license. The restriction prohibits him from doing any procedures with bone marrow or stem cells in his practice.

If the administrative law judge sides with the state, Grekos could face sanctions or permanent restriction or revocation of his license.

At issue was Grekos' treatment of a 69-year-old woman who went to him for a consult on Feb. 25, 2010, for numbness and tingling in her arms and legs after chemotherapy.

Grekos ordered imaging of her carotid arteries and her brain and later injected her own aspirated bone marrow into her cerebral circulatory system.

At home that evening, she fell and was hospitalized. She had suffered a severe brain stem injury and was taken off life support on April 2, 2010.

Licensed in Florida since 1992, Grekos' cardiology practice in recent years has focused more on stem cell therapy to repair damaged heart muscle, lungs and other tissue.

He sends a sample of a patient's lung to Israel to cultivate new stem cells and the blood gets sent to a clinic or hospital in the Dominican Republic. The patient travels to the Dominican Republic, where the stem cells are injected into the damaged tissue.

Grekos has established a relationship with doctors and clinicians in the Dominican Republic who do the injections on his behalf; he isn't licensed to practice medicine there.

The case has captured widespread attention among Grekos' supporters who swear their once-chronic illnesses have undergone dramatic improvement since having the therapy through him. Detractors say he is taking advantage of a vulnerable population with congestive heart failure, lung failure and other illnesses for which conventional treatments no longer are effective.

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Bonita stem cell doctor's attorney quits, state hearing still scheduled

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MORRISTOWN — From across the globe each year, thousands of people who have trouble having a healthy baby travel to a nondescript office building in Morristown — the home of Reproductive Medicine Associates of New Jersey, headquarters for the largest medical practice of its kind in the nation.

Julia Horowitz, a 16-year-old sophomore at Watchung Hills Regional High School, found her way there, too, but she was driven by a different goal. The Warren Township teen, like a growing number of people, sought help to unlock her genetic code — something that could affect decisions she makes, including having a baby.

Julia has known since the fifth grade that she was born with a genetic abnormality that was detected while she was still in her mother’s womb. Frightened but determined, her parents, Karen Kessler and Robert Horowitz, stayed the course even after their obstetrician said many couples facing the same prospect had terminated their pregnancies. Kessler delivered her third child, a healthy daughter, on Nov. 12, 1995, naming her Julia Faith, “because we wanted to believe we had faith that we could handle whatever was coming our way,” she said.

So far all’s well for Julia, an honors student and member of the Model UN and other academic clubs. But she decided last fall she didn’t want to wait until she was ready to start a family before she understood her DNA. With the help of her parents and the Morristown center, Julia embarked on a high-tech extracurricular activity: a mini-internship to learn about herself.

While most of the 5,000 patients treated every year by the multi-state practice are trying to overcome infertility, a growing number want to learn about their genetic history before they start a family, said Richard Scott, a reproductive endocrinologist who co-founded the practice.

The interest is on the rise because genetic research, much of it pioneered by Scott and his colleagues, can detect and even correct some problems. Obstetricians advise patients to screen to see if they are carriers of serious and potentially lethal diseases like cystic fibrosis and sickle cell anemia, said Scott.

“Part of the process of having a healthy family is understanding. There’s a lot of misunderstanding about our field. … It can be daunting, but it really does affect a lot of people. This is real-life stuff,” Scott said.

HEALTH AT STAKE

Julia was born with a “balanced translocation,” which occurs when a collection of genes, called a chromosome, breaks, and a portion of it reattaches to a different chromosome. When that happens, genetic matter may be lost. Julia’s goal was to find out whether the two affected chromosomes lost anything vital that would compromise her health.

“Each gene is like a short story,” Scott said. “The chromosome is a book which contains a compilation of thousands of short stories along with the index and related information so that they can all be found and used easily.”

When Julia was in the womb, geneticists knew how to identify balanced translocations, Scott said, but “there was nothing we could do about them beyond explaining to the couple why they might have a difficult time conceiving, have an increased risk for miscarriage” — and an increased risk of having a child with abnormalities.

“What has changed is our ability to assess that risk in advance,” Scott said. “This improves outcomes dramatically for these couples and makes for healthy babies.”

Scott added that with recent advances, some companies “will sequence your genome for you to see if they can determine your pre-disposition to all kinds of things — to diabetes or stroke or cancer, the list goes on and on. We don’t know exactly how to use all that information yet.”

Julia’s mini-intership allowed the staff to learn from her while she was learning from them, Scott said.

She donned a lab coat and spent about 25 hours after school in September with lab supervisor Heather Garnsey, overseen by Nathan Treff, director of Molecular Biology Research. She took her blood to get a DNA sample, then stained, magnified and examined it in some 260,000 spots, making it easy to see something extra or missing.

“Dr. Scott and Heather assured me, because there were no clinical symptoms it was very unlikely there was going to be some shocking news,” said Julia. “Still it was interesting to me throughout the entire process and still suspenseful.”

Every day, Julia said, she couldn’t wait to share what she had learned with Darrin Wolsko, Watchung Hills High School biology teacher and science department supervisor.

Wolsko said when he tutored Julia in biology, her fascination for science and genetics in particular were evident, musing about “what if we could clone this or do that.” But the experience of shadowing a genetic scientist and using cutting-edge technology to run tests ignited a passion that could shape the rest of her life, Wolsko said. “She sees a future in genetic medicine.”

Scott said science cannot yet answer what translocations mean, or determine their full impact on life.

“Some of the questions Julia asked in her work are some of the ones that are being studied at the highest levels,” Scott added. “This is not busy work.”

‘VERY REASSURING’

The research ended as well as she could have hoped for. “At the end of the entire process, we were able to look and see there wasn’t any important information that was lost,” Julia said. “That was very reassuring — something to ease my mind, and my mother’s and father’s.”

But while the research showed the genetic defect won’t increase the likelihood of passing on problems if she gives birth, it still means Julia may have difficulty conceiving or carrying a child, Scott said. If that happens, “she is likely to end up back here, where we can make an embryo test-tube-baby style, grow it out to 200 or 300 cells, then take a cell out and test it to make sure there that it’s normal and balanced.”

“The more she understands herself and the more we understand about her circumstances, it will be easier for her to navigate when she gets to that point in her life,” he said. “She doesn’t have to fear it.”

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Washington, Feb 5 (ANI): Using a liquid laser, researchers have devised a better way to detect the slight genetic mutations that might make a person more vulnerable to a particular type of cancer or other diseases.

This work by University of Michigan researchers could advance understanding of the genetic basis of diseases.

It also has applications in personalized medicine, which aims to target drugs and other therapies to individual patients based on a thorough knowledge of their genetic information.

The researchers say their technique works much better than the current approach, which uses fluorescent dye and other biological molecules to find and bind to mutated DNA strands.

When a patrol molecule catches one of these rogues, it emits a fluorescent beacon. This might sound like a solid system, but it's not perfect. The patrol molecules tend to bind to healthy DNA as well, giving off a background glow that is only slightly dimmer than a positive signal.

“Sometimes, we can fail to see the difference,” said Xudong Fan, an associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and principal investigator on the project.

“If you cannot see the difference in signals, you could misdiagnose. The patient may have the mutated gene, but you wouldn't detect it.”

In the conventional fluorescence technique, the signal from mutated DNA might be only a few tenths of a percent higher than the background noise. With Fan's new approach it's hundreds of times brighter.

“We found a clever way to amplify the intrinsic difference in the signals,” Fan said.

He did it with a bit of backtracking.

Liquid lasers, discovered in the late '60s, amplify light by passing it through a dye, rather than a crystal, as solid-state lasers do. Fan, who works at the intersection of biomedical engineering and photonics, has been developing them for the past five years.

In his unique set-up, the signal is amplified in a glass capillary called a “ring resonator cavity.”

Last year, Fan and his research group found that they could employ DNA (the blueprints for life that reside in all cells) to modulate a liquid laser, or turn it on and off.

His group is one of just a few in the world to accomplish this, Fan said. At the time, they didn't have a practical application in mind. Then they had an epiphany.

“We thought, 'Let's look at the laser output. Can we see what's causing the different outputs and use it to detect differences in the DNA?'” Fan said.

“I had an intuition, and it turns out the output difference was huge,” Fan added.

The journal editors named this a “hot paper” that “advances knowledge in a rapidly evolving field of high current interest.”

The study has been published in German journal Angewandte Chemie. (ANI)

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