B) WHAT COMPANIES ARE DOING

Questioning the Allure of Putting Cells in the Bank

By ANDREW POLLACK
New York Times: Published: January 29, 2008

Can a woman’s period save her life years later?

A company called Cryo-Cell International says that it can — that menstrual fluid contains stem cells that might one day be used for medical treatments. The company has not published research verifying the claim. But using the slogan “Your monthly miracle,” it has begun offering, for a fee, to collect and store cells from the fluid for a woman’s future use.

Cryo-Cell, in Oldsmar, Fla., is one of several companies trying to make a business out of banking stem cells. Although businesses that store umbilical cord blood have operated for years, the new services have a potentially broader appeal, to people who are not having babies at the moment.
There are companies that offer to extract and store stem cells from adult blood, from fat removed by liposuction, from children’s baby teeth after they fall out and from leftover embryos at fertility clinics.

But some experts say consumers should think twice before spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on such services, because it is not clear how useful such cells will be. “In the stem cell area, we have a problem with truth in advertising,” said Christopher Scott, director of the Program on Stem Cells in Society at Stanford. “Some of these companies are skirting right on the edge of what’s truthful and what’s vaporware.”

The companies, some of them small and financially shaky, are capitalizing on the excitement surrounding stem cells. The ventures portray themselves as a form of biological insurance. Cells collected from a person could one day be used to treat that person without immune system rejection. “There are potentially scores of applications that could emerge over time,” said Mercedes Walton, chief executive of Cryo-Cell.

The fee for collection and processing the cells ranges from $499 to $7,500, depending on the company. There is also a yearly fee of $89 to $699 for storing the cells in liquid nitrogen.
The services urge people not to wait. Cryo-Cell says that even if a woman will be menstruating for years to come, cells from younger women will be more robust.

Some people buying the services say there is little to lose from doing so except money, even if the chance that the cells will be needed or useful is slim. “The idea is just to have them,” said Stephanie Seidman, a patent lawyer in San Diego with a doctorate in molecular biology. “Once you get sick, it’s too late.” Ms. Seidman had cells collected from her blood at an anti-aging clinic, using a service sold by NeoStem Inc. of New York.

Scientists say it is quite unlikely a person will ever need such cells. And the technology could change so much that cells stored now may not be needed if a person falls ill in 10 or 20 years. Recently, scientists found a way to turn skin cells into cells that behave like embryonic stem cells. That might allow a person of any age to have customized tissue created on the spot.
The companies’ Web sites often talk about all the diseases that may one day be treated with stem cells. But experts say it could be years, if ever, for such treatments to become available.
The main use of stem cells now is to reconstitute the immune system after strong chemotherapy or radiation treatment for certain cancers of the blood. The cells are generally blood-forming stem cells from the bone marrow or bloodstream. Transplants of such cells, often called bone marrow transplants, are used for other metabolic and immune system diseases, as well.
But much of the excitement about stem cells is their possible use to create other tissues like nerve cells to treat Parkinson’s disease or insulin-producing cells for diabetes. The main focus there has been on human embryonic stem cells, which are created from embryos and can potentially turn into all types of tissue in the body.

One cell bank, StemLifeLine, offers to make such embryonic stem cells from the embryos couples have left over after undergoing in vitro fertilization. The cells, which would cost a couple at least $4,000, would not be a complete genetic match either to either parent or to any of their children, which could conceivably limit their usefulness.

Other cell banks are working with adult cells, which are present in the body throughout life. There is evidence that some of these cells can turn into a diverse range of tissues, but the question is unsettled. Stem cells in the pulp of baby teeth can clearly turn into part of the teeth. But contentions that the cells can also form other types of cells, like nerve cells, are more controversial.

“There’s never been a demonstration that these cells actually form nerve cells that can function as nerve cells,” said Pamela Gehron Robey, who headed the lab at the National Institutes of Health, where the baby-teeth stem cells were discovered.

Yet the services offering to store baby teeth talk about all the diseases that stem cells might treat one day. “One day, the Tooth Fairy could save your child’s life” is the slogan of BioEden Inc. of Austin, Tex., which says the cells might be used in the future for numerous diseases, including neurological ones like Parkinson’s and spinal cord injury.

BioEden has more than 1,000 customers, said Jeff Johnson, its president and co-founder. It charges $595 a tooth for extraction and collection and $89 for yearly storage. BioEden solicits dentists, elementary schools and PTAs to help spread its message and collection kits. It will pay dentists or schools $100 a tooth.