“If you’re a student living on a $700 monthly budget, an extra $200 would be nice,” Bernow says. “If you work for me 10 hours, I don’t mind paying you $200. They should be paid more, but we are not allowed to do that and we respect all the frameworks.”
Many countries have laws that prevent charging for tissue donation. In In the UK it is illegal pay people to provide blood, plasma or other tissues, although donors may be reimbursed for expenses and lost wages. In Sweden – as in several other EU countries – donors can be paid for their time, but they are not allowed to receive a salary.
“Should they pay anything?” – asks Hank Greely, a law professor at Stanford University, specializing in ethical and legal issues in biological sciences. “Depending on who you ask, it may or may not be a sin. But it is a venial sin, not a mortal sin.” In the US, people can be paid to donate sperm, eggs and blood.
What may set stem cells apart is the cost of the treatment itself. Bernow says each donation yields approximately 50 ml of tissue containing mesenchymal stem cells used in therapies. These cells are then purified and replicated in the Cellcolab laboratory space, ultimately resulting in approximately 200 doses of therapeutic stem cells per donation. Assuming each treatment costs $16,500, that means a single donation could be used for more than $3 million worth of treatment. Bernow says he currently accepts 15 to 20 donors a year.
Of course, cells are not a factor influencing the cost of stem cell treatment. Bernow says that for a $25,000 intravenous treatment, about $10,000 of that cost goes to running the clinical trial, with the rest partially covering the costs of extracting, duplicating, preserving and shipping the stem cells. He emphasizes that the main goal of his startup is to reduce the demand for donors and the cost of stem cells by producing more stem cells from each donation.
“It’s an incredibly easy economy of scale,” he says. “Our goal is to really get prices down over the next decade. We want to find a step change so we can get more cells produced from one donor.”
For Greele, the biggest problem with stem cell therapy is the treatment methods themselves. “My main concern is effectiveness,” he says. The FDA has warned people against stem cell therapies that are not approved in the US. “There is a lot of misleading information about these products on the Internet, including claims about the conditions they can be used to treat,” the agency warned in its letter. entry from 2020. “The FDA is concerned that many patients seeking medicines and remedies may be misled by information about products that are illegally marketed, have not been proven to be safe and effective, and in some cases may have serious safety issues that may put patients at risk. “
As for donors who paid $200 for their contribution to a treatment that ultimately costs millions of dollars, Greely is less concerned. “Welcome to capitalism.”
Updated 12/02/2024 14:00 GMT: The figure in the headline has been changed from thousands to millions to more accurately reflect the potential retail value of a single dose of donated stem cells.