What would you do to save your child? For most parents, the answer is “anything.” But when your son or daughter has a chronic, debilitating condition, the options seem limited. That’s why so many families are looking at stem cell therapies that offer “miracle cures” at high prices.

These treatments offer hope, but they are also extremely experimental—and in some cases, entirely mysterious. Our latest MATTER release explores one family’s experience as they travel from Buenos Aires to Beijing in an attempt to find an answer to their son’s cerebral palsy.

Complex stories like this are what we do for a living, but even so: this piece is an unusual one for us. Why? Because it started life elsewhere. What you see is actually the work of two teams: our own editorial crew and a Spanish-language publication called Materia.

We’ve known Materia for a little while, ever since I ran into founding editor Patricia Fernández de Lis in 2012. It turned out that not only did we have a common name, we also had a kinship around our ambitions to tell great stories about science. We vowed to work together.

So, when they ran “Celulas madre para curar la desesperanza”, a mid-length piece about a struggling Argentinian family who were paying tens of thousands of dollars for experimental stem cell treatments in China, we saw an opportunity to work together.

We worked with writer Andrés Grippo over the space of a month or so to get the story translated, re-edited, and fill in some gaps that would take it from being a great feature to a full-blown MATTER story. This was not a straightforward project: Translation is never easy, and, as the story developed, we realized there was some extra reporting to do, and some processes were new (Grippo told us that fact-checking, which is not common in Argentina, was “challenging but a great experience”).

It wasn’t simple, but in the end we’ve got a story that hopefully we can all be proud of: the tale that explains why people are drawn to new treatments to help their children, and an examination of the dangerously opaque industry that is turning their desperation into huge profit.

One last point. Why bother? Given that it involved extra work and complexity in turning a Spanish story into an English one, what’s the benefit?

First, it’s part of our ethos to be international. Although we’re primarily an American publication with British roots, we know important stories can come from anywhere—and telling stories from all around the world is a big part of what we want to do. We’ve already reported on Hungarian photographers, neuroscientists in Switzerland, the international drug underground, and Russian assassinations. If we can join forces with somebody locally to tell a story we want to share, all the better.