Cell Banking for Future Autologous Cell Therapies Seems Pointless

I'll start here by pointing out the most useful application for cryopreservation of cells and tissues: it greatly reduces the cost of logistics in transplant medicine. When you need to coordinate people and cells and places on timescales of a few days, weeks, or months, the ability to confidently put the cells into safe storage for short period of time changes the whole tenor of the affair. Just look at the organ transplant field, for example, which is defined by the fact that this storage cannot yet be achieved. Organ transplantation is enormously expensive not just because the donor pool is limited, but also because organs cannot be kept alive and useful for very long outside the body. When the state of reversible tissue crypopreservation advances to permit reliable vitrification and restoration of whole organs, the whole field of transplantation will change dramatically. That change in logistics has already taken place for applications involving cells, such as fertility biotechnology, but long enough ago that most of us probably don't appreciate the magnitude of the difference between before and after. A recent startup, Forever Labs, is aiming at an application of cell cryopreservation that I think is much less useful. This is the practice of banking cells, particularly stem cells, in the hope of using them in cell therapies in the more distant future, decades away. The theory here is that you are banking today's less damaged cells, and because they are less damaged...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Of Interest Source Type: blogs