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.
But, in the future, those cord blood stem cells could be used for the treatment of a much wider range of illnesses. If, following further research on how adult and embryo 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. A team of scientists from the University of Bologna in Italy has developed a new technique for freezing human eggs that improves the survival rate after thawing. The researchers, who published their results in the latest issue of the journal Human Reproduction, say they achieved fertilisation rates comparable to those obtained using fresh eggs.