US firms are widening stem cell banking from cord blood to menstrual blood to fat. But is it all worth the effort?
A company called Cryo-Cell International says that menstrual fluid contains stem cells that might one day be used for medical treatments.
Then 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.
Last January, the American Academy of Pediatrics, in a policy statement, discouraged private banking of cord blood as “biological insurance” for a child without a known disease risk. It said there was a small chance — from 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 200,000 — that a child would ever need the blood.
But 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.
Menstrual fluid is the newest service, and the least is known about these cells. Cryo-Cell has long been in the cord-blood-banking business, but in November it began a service called C’elle for the menstrual blood.
