From Alzheimer’s patients to cellulite sufferers, it seems the stem cell revolution can offer hope to just about anyone who needs it.

In Russia, one of the leaders of the field where regulations are comparatively lax, beauty conscious customers can pick from dozens of clinics providing stem cell injections to help their body fight the ageing process, according to leading British newspaper The Daily Mail. The world’s largest clinic, in Ukraine, has openly experimented in stem cell therapy for more than 15 years and administers hundreds of anti-ageing therapies a year, reports the Mail.

Such cosmetic treatment is unlikely in Bermuda as Stemedica says its project is based on adult stem cells — not embryonic stem cells used for Russian and Ukrainian beauty treatment.

But Stemedica is pledging to do much more than iron out a few wrinkles in the hope of making people look a bit younger.

Stemedica is offering the ultimate hope for thousands of patients who have illnesses they fear nothing else can cure.

According to its website, adult stem cells have been used with “profound results” on sufferers of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis and stroke.

The website goes on to list other diseases it claims adult stem cells have benefited, including neurodegenerative eye diseases, spinal cord injuries, brain injuries, scars, burns, diabetic ulcers and bone damage.

Some experts in the UK and US, such as Arthur Tucker of East London and the City Research Ethics Committee and George Daley of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, say much of this work is unproven and claim any human who undergoes it is therefore the subject of an experiment.

International guidelines on human experimentation have been in place for decades through the Nuremberg Code and the Declaration of Helsinki, which set out ethical duties for physicians.

As massive ethical debates have raged across the world, particularly over the destruction of embryos and experimentation on humans, many countries have strictly monitored stem cell research through their own organisations.

The UK has the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority; the US, the Food and Drug Administration; and Canada, the Medicine and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency.

One of the biggest ethical rows has been in the US, where President George Bush stance that stem cell research “crosses a moral boundary” has blocked clinics from offering many types of treatment.

In other countries, regulations are not so stringent.

Barbados, where political leaders have embraced embryonic stem cell research, has become known in some quarters as the stem cell capital of the developed world, with the Mail reporting it attracts hundreds of patients a year for cosmetic treatments despite criticism from religious groups on the island.

Similarly, the Mail says, the Dominican Republic offers package deals to people who want to combine a holiday in the sun with stem cell therapy; and Moscow boasts a cellulite clinic in which aborted foetuses are injected into customers’ thighs and buttocks at $30,000 per course.

There is no suggestion this kind of treatment will take place in Bermuda.

Adult stem cell treatment is available in many countries including Mexico, Italy, Uruguay and Thailand — and Portugal, where 27-year-old paraplegic Jeremy Drover, from Hamilton Parish, underwent treatment last year.

South Korea had claimed a lead in the field of adult and umbilical cord stem cells — but its reputation took a battering when cloning pioneer Hwang Woo-suk was found to have fabricated research for his claimed breakthrough on cloned stem cells in 2005.