Banking on the future

This week's BioNews reports on news that a company has launched a new service offering storage of cord blood to parents of new-born babies. Dubbed 'the ultimate in health insurance', the service will enable children suffering from blood disorders such as leukaemia to receive a blood cell transplant using their own cells, stored years earlier. Using one's own cells would avoid the problems of tissue rejection that can arise when a patient is given a bone marrow transplant provided by a donor.

Whilst the development has been greeted with enthusiasm, some have voiced concerns that a commercial service such as this, which costs parents £600, will be available only to those who can afford it. But one woman taking part in the pilot said she considered this to be little different, in terms of cost, from paying an insurance premium. Parents are, after all, only too keen to buy advantages for their children in other areas of life.

Providing cord blood banking for all babies may seem expensive to the National Health Service (NHS), since only one in 1800 babies will go on to develop leukaemia before the age of 15 years. But, in the future, those cord blood stem cells could be used for the treatment of a much wider range of illnesses. Recent research suggests that stem cells which are already assigned particular tasks in the body (such as producing blood cells) could have their biological clocks turned back to produce unspecialised stem cells, capable of developing into any of the different cell types in the human body.

If, following further research on how adult and embryonic stem cells produce other cell types, this hope becomes a reality, the storage of cord blood cells could be incredibly cost effective. It is possible that children born in decades to come could have a permanent store of stem cells, which could be adapted to treat anything from strokes to diabetes.