Ok I've got some answers, and they have a very unexpected link to my research. Dana White did not get stem cell therapy. He got a treatment developed by
Dr. Peter Wehling that is called
Orthokine in Germany and
Regenokine in the United States (not FDA approved, so its not actively advertised). These treatments are typically used in orthopedics. A number of professional athletes have received it in their joints as a career extender. Besides Dana White's case, I could find no mention of it being used in the ear. I suspect that Dr. Wehling has shared his formulation with an ENT colleague, and that they did an intra-typmanic injection of it. I have some suspicion as to who this might be, but can't be sure and I don't want everyone going crazy calling this person until I can confirm. The orthopedic version of the treatment costs 6,000 Euro and is not covered by insurance. I have no idea of the US cost or of the cost of the Meniere's treatment.
I had to buy Dr. Wehling's book, "The End of Pain" ($18 on iTunes, but probably not worth buying otherwise) to find this out, but what they are doing is taking the patient's blood down and spinning it down to remove a specific cell type that is rich in a cytokine called Interleukin-1 Receptor Antagonist (IL-1Ra). Interleukin-1 is an inflammatory cytokine involved in fever and other inflammatory conditions. IL-Ra antagonizes (neutralizes) IL-1, so if injected into the ear of someone suffering from an inflammatory condition of the ear like Meniere's, it is conceivable that it could cure them. In Dana White's case, it appears as if it did.
It should be noted that this is an experimental treatment, and I think that it may only work on a small portion of people on this forum, but it sounds really promising for people like me who could benefit. I'm looking at it as a possible treatment for myself, but I'm going to see if I can track down some more info. Of course I'll share what I find.
Stop Here If You Are Not Interested In the Boring Scientific Stuff!
How someone made the connection from an orthopedic joint injection to injecting it into the ear is really an amazing and insightful leap in my opinion. When I was writing
this paper, which I was co-first-author on, I snuck a paragraph into the discussion on what I thought was a connection between the bony remodeling in the otic capsule (the incredibly dense bone around the cochlea) and Meniere's disease. The idea was that in diseases where there was a defect in bone growth, that inflammatory cytokines like from the RANKL system like IL-1 were leaking through the bone and into the part of the ear that maintains the ionic gradients that support hearing. It had been vaguely suggested in the literature, but our paper was the first to put it all together and come out and say it. Frankly I was surprised that the publisher let it stay in the paper, because there was only indirect suggestion of a link in the previous literature, and it had only a peripheral relevance to our paper - our experimental mice (who had a mouse version of Meniere's) had a defect in bone growth called hypo-phosphatemic rickets. I suspect that whoever had the ah-ha moment that led them to inject it into someone's ear had read some of the same literature that I had and made the connection to orthopedics - its a super crazy connection to make, and a pretty ballsy move to actually do it.