Dr. Neil Riordan on health: what the evidence says · JRE #1066

What the evidence says 01 / RECORD

Riordan claimed that exactly 800 human clinical trials have ever been conducted with mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) and that his book references all of them. Clinical trial registries such as ClinicalTrials.gov are continuously updated as new studies launch and are registered, so any fixed count of MSC trials becomes stale quickly, and framing a single figure as the complete universe of trials overstates certainty. Registry-based academic analyses of MSC trials, including a comprehensive review of MSC trials for a single indication (osteoarthritis), describe large and steadily growing trial counts rather than a static total, and note that registries like ClinicalTrials.gov, the EU registry, and China's registry each capture only part of the global picture. This indicates the true number of MSC human trials was likely already higher than 800 by 2018, when this interview aired, and has continued to grow since, meaning the 'exactly 800, and that's all of them' framing understated the field's scope even at the time it was said.