Home › Blog › Regenexx Continues Expansion into Europe by Welcoming New UK Site

We were proud to announce last year that we added a European site in Belgium and now equally excited to announce that we have added a UK site. These sites are critical for us as we have always had great interest in what we do from European patients who have needed to travel to the U.S. for care. This European expansion also comes on the heels of new sites in Asia and India.

Regenexx International

Our first site outside of the U.S. was Australia, where Kevin Boundy took the leap with us several years ago. What followed were sites in India and then Taiwan. Then we added more sites in India and our first European site in Belgium, home of the EU. We are in discussions to finalize a site in China, and, hopefully, more European locations will come online here in the next 12–24 months.

Our UK Site

I first met our two newest European physicians on a trip to Europe two years ago. I was impressed that both Dr. Kirkor and Dr. Juozaitis were highly skilled interventional spine physicians who were dedicated to moving their careers in the direction of regenerative medicine. Since then, I have continued to be impressed that they have spent a huge number of hours traveling back and forth to Colorado for additional training through both Regenexx and the Interventional Orthopedics Foundation. The name of their new regenerative medicine practice is Algocells and is located in London. 

What It Takes to Become a Rengenexx Provider

We’re starting to see vendors who sell amniotic or umbilical cord tissue or bedside stem cell kits claim they have provider networks. In actual fact, these are simply client lists of physicians who have agreed to buy and use the product they sell. However, what these networks clearly are not is a select group of providers who are chosen very carefully based on base training and then provided with intensive additional training. They are simply lists of doctors or chiropractic offices who buy a product.

Regenexx has always been different. Take, for example, a plastic surgeon who approached me last week. He claimed to have been injecting knees with adipose stem cells for many years and wanted to join our network. Since he didn’t have the basic interventional experience on how to guide injections with ultrasound and/or fluoroscopy and didn’t know much about musculoskeletal injury based on his training, he was turned down. He clearly didn’t understand that what we do is practice interventional orthopedics. This takes not only a basic level of training but also intensive additional coursework that can amount to hundreds of hours. Hence, it has always been our intention to grow slowly and by invitation only. To see why we’re different, check out my video below:

As we sign on more and more self-funded employer health plans, the method behind this madness becomes clear. Regenexx is about keeping the quality of what’s done as high as possible. This is impossible to do when you sell a product like a vial of amnio tissue or an FDA-approved kit because there will always be pressure to sell more widgets. Hence, you will always relax your standards of training to push product. Our focus has always been different. Perfecting what we inject and how it gets injected. To learn more about our corporate program, see the video below:

Since the beginning of our provider network, I, as medical director, have turned down hundreds of physicians who wanted to join. We have also kicked physicians off the network who didn’t maintain our high standards. Hence, the fact that Algocells was accepted and then is jumping through all of the intense training requirements we set speaks volumes about the quality of these doctors.

The upshot? We would like to welcome our Algocells UK site to the Regenexx family. We expect great things from this site as we continue to build out Europe and Asia. Our goal is to make sure that everyone on earth has access to a high-quality Regenexx procedure!

Chris Centeno, MD is a specialist in regenerative medicine and the new field of Interventional Orthopedics. Centeno pioneered orthopedic stem cell procedures in 2005 and is responsible for a large amount of the published research on stem cell use for orthopedic applications. View Profile