WHILE aesthetics doctors have been finding it increasingly difficult to offer more cutting-edge treatments and techniques in the past couple of years, they could well get approval to do so with the creation of a new independent review board.
So, if injecting animal foetal cells into the body and harvesting one's own fat or blood to be injected in one's face are treatments currently not available here because the Ministry of Health is iffy about them, these could soon be implemented on a clinical trial basis.
David Loh, honorary secretary and spokesman of the Society of Aesthetic Medicine, announced the new independent review board yesterday - CREATEIRB. It stands for Create Independent Review Board and its members will comprise doctors who are GCP (Good Clinical Practice) certified and who have taken the Institutional Review Board (IRB) exams.
'This is the first independent non-hospital or institution-based review board in Singapore,' says Dr Loh. He says that most hospitals have IRBs made up of panels of doctors who approve clinical trials that will test these new technologies while providing an oversight function.
In this way, the use of such technologies can be monitored closely with the goal that scientific evidence will emerge from these trials to either support or disprove the technologies. But currently, for aesthetics doctors, most of whom are in private practice, they don't have a similar facility.
'CREATEIRB was set up because, as a burgeoning field in medicine, aesthetic medicine has similar concerns. But since most aesthetic practitioners are non-institutional doctors in private practice, the creation of an independent review board was necessary to provide safeguards, legitimacy and assurance to patients that all the procedures have been subject to rigorous clinical trials and independent oversight,' says Dr Loh.
Aesthetics doctors can apply for clinical trials to CREATEIRB, which must be finally approved by the Health Sciences Authority (HSA). In fact, the world's first clinical trial using platelet-rich plasma to treat wrinkles and augment acne scar resurfacing was approved this past January by the HSA.
Dr Loh says this independent review board will open up a whole new chapter for the field of aesthetic medicine in Singapore. 'For the first time, frontier technologies can be tested openly and transparently and, at every stage of its use, evidence can be evaluated by a panel of doctors. And if the evidence is strong, it can be published in peer-reviewed journals.'
With this new board, patients will also be fully informed about the experimental nature of certain treatments and be assured that, at all times, multiple layers of safeguards and scrutiny are in place.
Without CREATEIRB, Singapore runs the risk of lagging behind the rest of the world, Dr Loh points out. 'Medicine, as a cutting-edge scientific field, inherently means that there are always frontier technologies that have not been rigorously tested in clinical trials.'
An example of how CREATEIRB can foster the exploration of frontier technologies in a safer and more transparent manner arises in the field of ADRC research. Short for Adipocyte Derived Regenerative Cells, ADRCs are recognised stem-cells and are harvested in a procedure similar to liposuction.
These stem-cells have numerous potential cosmetic applications, but because these treatments are necessarily experimental at this stage, CREATEIRB will provide the necessary safeguards to guide the clinical trials to a stage where they can be subjected to peer scrutiny.
The Society of Aesthetic Medicine (Singapore) was formed in October 2005 by a group of aesthetics doctors. One of the main aims of the society is to facilitate the development of aesthetic medicine in Singapore and fellowship of aesthetics doctors in Singapore and the region.
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This article was first published in The Business Times.
