  
Infant stem cells to be stored as safeguard against future illness
Last Updated: 2001-02-26 12:30:31 EST (Reuters Health)
By Richard Woodman
LONDON (Reuters Health) - A company is to launch a service in Britain storing infants' stem cells as a safeguard against future potentially fatal diseases, according to a report in the Observer newspaper on Sunday.
It said that for a fee of 600 pounds, parents would be able to have blood taken from their baby's umbilical cord and store it for up to 20 years in liquid nitrogen to provide the child with the means to restore damaged organs, blood or tissue.
"We have already launched storage schemes in Holland and Germany, and now we are going to start up in Britain," Shamshad Ahmed of Cryo-Care UK, which is pioneering the service in Britain, told the newspaper. According to the report, the company has built a storage facility outside Brussels for keeping the stem cells.
"We can guarantee the cells will survive for at least 20 years. After 2020 we will have to look to see if we can extend the scheme even further, and I anticipate that should be possible," Ahmed added.
Derek Tuffnell, a gynaecologist at Bradford Royal Infirmary in Yorkshire said, "Gynaecologists such as myself will be taking the first samples in the next few days while we get this system up and running. After that, the company hopes to be able to train midwives to do it."
He had no doubts of the value of the new service. "If a child or adolescent gets a disorder, for example leukaemia, their stem cells will give us the means to replenish their bodies with healthy blood and save their lives," he told the newspaper.
The report recalls that scientists at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco last week reported promising results in the use of stem cells as a means to replace tissue damaged in many parts of the body, including the brain.
This work, and other research carried out across the world, suggest that in the near future stem cells have potential applications as treatments for diseases that include Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, cerebral haemorrhages, muscular disorders, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, malignant tumours and blood disorders.
-Westport Newsroom 203 319 2700
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