Forever Labs preserves young stem cells | Hacker News Reader

Forever Labs preserves young stem cells

techcrunch.com

91 pointsjanober18 comments

This has been available for at least the last 20 years in a different way. I remember a service at the hospital that they offered when my kids were born. If I remember correctly they would cryo freeze the umbilical cord for the future if some technology would arrive that could utilize it for medical purposes. We skipped it thinking eventually they will be able to figure things out without it.

Are there any treatments for using these harvested stem cells that have completed clinical trials? Or is this all conjecture?

How does this relate to collecting cord blood from newborns which I've heard is total baloney for all but specific at risk instances (and even then only useful for siblings).

Hey, Mark from FL, here.

For bone marrow mononuclear cells or mesenchymal stem cells, the closest are phase III, such as for heart attack https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01569178 and stroke https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01716481, but there are over 500 trails using the cells for a number of age-related disease.

Many early phases have been completed and moved forward to later phases, but this takes time before approval for many good reasons. The explosion in trials does relate to their therapeutic potential, which we began demonstrating in the lab 15 years ago.

TBH, one issue is that these trials use fairly disparate cell expansion techniques, and some do not expand at all. These techniques have advanced quite a bit in just the last several years. This has lead to disparate results from seemingly similar trials. Much progress has been made on these fronts, however. It's how it works. It takes time.

Umbilical cord blood isn't baloney. However, the FDA approved uses are limited. There are, however, many trials using them for treatment of age-related disease.

How long does the extracted supply last. As far as I was able to discern from the article, more stem cells are grown and banked, so if they would be used for several future treatments is there a way to ensure that they last or is it over after a few uses of your cells.

We store the cells in three larger aliquots and six smaller ones. Most clinical applications employ prior expansion of the cells before administration. As an example, this trial using them to aid in kidney transplantation uses 1-2M mesenchymal stem cells per kg of body weight: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02057965 that would be between 80-160M cells for most patients. For MSCs, one can get those numbers from one of our smallest aliquots.

Stem cell expansion continues to improve, and with it, we can get more cells from fewer without adversely affecting them in the process. As expanded cells can be cryopreserved just as freshly collected ones, it is possible that the cells we collect can be expanded to vast numbers, and then stored for many future applications.

As an example, with just one of our small aliquots, I was able to generate more MSCs in culture than I have in my body.

It's basically insurance in case there's some big breakthrough in the future and you need the younger blood.

Banking cells for the purpose of use later in regenerative medicine is supremely pointless. It is a hedge against technological development in cell reprogramming and repair - technological development that is progressing at a revolutionary pace right now, and that will soon enough enable old cells to be restored to youthful configurations. Merely reprogramming cell samples into induced pluripotent stem cells has already been shown to do some of that.

Let us say for the sake of argument, however, that the hedge turns out to be worthwhile, and the exceedingly unlikely course of biotechnology not progressing much past where it is now over the next 20 years takes place. Woe. But then having those banked cells is basically useless because there is very little of worth you can do with them. All of the potential cell therapy applications that might be rolled out today are marginal for someone at very late age.

So cell banking for future use in cell therapies is basically a business that is only useful to its customers if the biotechnology of cellular control both fails to advance and advances spectacularly.

(Mark from FL)

>Banking cells for the purpose of use later in regenerative medicine is supremely pointless. It is a hedge against technological development in cell reprogramming and repair

Obviously, I disagree that the hedge is pointless. I do agree that rejuvenation tech will improve, I am working on some, actually. However, IMO a youthful reservoir of multipotent cells represents an early onramp for many of these applications.

There are vast unknowns in cellular biology, and I never need go back more than a few months to find some largely unknown but recently discovered machinery: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28798046 Some have been known for a time, and yet remain poorly understood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vault_(organelle) Sometimes, just when we think we have a handle on something, we find that the reality is more complicated: http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/v14/n6/full/nmeth.4293.h...

Not to mention the abysmal state of reproducibility in biomedical research: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39054778

Don't get me wrong, I am not a pessimist. We are making, and will continue to make, great strides. However, biology intervention in humans is very difficult. Even something as basic as male pattern baldness continues to confound us. Just because we have the tools in the lab, doesn't mean that we can practically apply them. However, we will be able to work upon cells ex vivo much sooner than we can in vivo... ;)

Mark, could you comment on MSCs vs iPSCs? A Nobel Prize was awarded in 2012 [1] and I'm aware of many labs using these "Yamanaka factors" to reprogram differentiated body cells (like skin) into stem cells. And it is possible to move stem cells between people [2]. Right now of course everyone is waiting for additional data on stem cell therapies (and for regulation to catch up [3])... but by the time therapies are approved for stored MSCs, wouldn't people just be creating allogenic iPSC "young stem cells" on-demand? Curious to hear your thoughts!

[1] https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2... [2] https://www.nature.com/news/japanese-man-is-first-to-receive... [3] https://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/u...

>It is a hedge against technological development in cell reprogramming and repair - technological development that is progressing at a revolutionary pace right now, and that will soon enough enable old cells to be restored to youthful configurations.

Popular science has has been on the verge of immortality for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. My point isn't that it isn't happening, but statistically we are probably further away from cell repair than you think. If you have cash to burn, there are worse things to gamble on.

Progress in cell therapy strongly depends on progress in controlling cell state. A world in which the research community has advanced enough to make stored cells really useful, but not advanced to the point at which it couldn't just recreate something very similar to those cells from an aged skin sample at little cost seems highly unlikely.

As we grow older we accumulate more and more mutations. Storing stem cells at a young age can not only be potentially used to generate organs and blood if / when those technologies mature... but it can also give an archive of your healthy cell type, allowing one to "restore to youthful configurations".

Mutations are stochastic.

Pick a hundred cell lineages from skin samples, and merge back to the common root genome minus the stochastic mutations in their ancestors. Then apply CRISPR or some selection technique to the skin sample you've converted to iPSCs to obtain the genome you want. Most of that could be done with today's technology, were anyone so inclined.

Twenty years from now this will be an afternoon intro project on one of the lab machines in CellBio 101.

Congrats to Steve and the whole team at FL! They've been working on this for a long time, and Steve can really hustle. I'm excited to see what they can do with YC behind them :)

edit: phrasing. apparently 'huslter' has connotations other than 'one who hustles' lol

I don't think "hustler" is interpreted as a compliment in the medical industry. Too long a history of snake oil salesmen peddling to the afflicted.

"For adults, it’s not so common, and there’s a lot of snake oil out there, Clausnitzer cautions."

“You’ll essentially young-blood effect yourself,” Clausnitzer joked

Snake oil salesman warning against other snake oil?

Am I the only one who feels like I need to be even more scrupulous when the phrase "Ivy-League" is thrown in descriptions for credibility?

I feel like some of the greatest crimes and scams have come out of the Ivy League.

In short, for some reason using Ivy League often feels like a negative signal to me in terms of actually getting results.

Maybe I'm just a biased jerk, also open to that.

Interesting startup.

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