Tech elites are freezing their stem cells to extend life

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• A startup called Forever Labs freezes and stores
  people’s stem cells as a kind of back-up drive for their future
  selves.
• The company is now offering a way to bank stem cells
  from fat stores instead of bone marrow.
• Stem cells have a range of potential therapeutic uses
  in conditions such as diabetes and heart disease, since they
  can turn into any kind of cell.
• But for now, stem cells are used only for very limited
  purposes, like treating cancer.

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Your next effort to prolong your life could involve an awkward
conversation with your plastic surgeon. Don’t throw away the fat
you’ve just removed from my liposuction procedure, you might ask
them. Instead, save the excess material because it’s rich in stem
cells.

Beginning this week, longevity startup Forever Labs will offer
its customers the ability to bank the stem cells in their fat
stores — the same material that’s removed and destroyed after
liposuction. Those stem cells are seen as a key component of
health. Some believe they may also hold the keys to a longer,
better life.

Founded in 2015, Forever Labs collaborates with a network of
specialized doctors to siphon stem cells from customers’ bone
marrow. The company is now also partnering with some plastic
surgeons to allow people who are already undergoing liposuction
to bank the stem cells from the fat that would otherwise be
discarded.

“If you’re going to throw them in the garbage, you might as well
bank them,” Mark Katakowski, Forever Labs’ co-founder and CEO,
told Business Insider.

Forever Labs then freezes the stem cells, delivers them to one of
its cell-banking facilities, and maintains them under careful
conditions. The hope is that one day, more advanced science will
allow patients to have their own young cells injected back into
their bodies. According to this line of thinking, these cells
could then do everything from fight aging to help treat diseases
like diabetes.

“This is like a back-up,” Katakowski said.

Forever Labs charges $2,750 per year or a one-time payment of
$7,000 to harvest a customer’s stem cells from the bone marrow
extracted by an orthopedic surgeon. (The surgery is included in
that cost.) The new method using fat is $1,000 cheaper for those
paying annually, but the one-time payment costs the same. 

What a bank of your stem cells might be used for

A
tray of stem cells at the University of Connecticut’s Stem Cell
Institute.
Getty Images/Spencer
Platt

A medical physicist and former research scientist for the Henry
Ford Health System in Michigan, Katakowski was spurred to bank
his own stem cells in 2015 after studying their therapeutic
potential in mice.

Stem cells are unique because they can develop into many
different cell types, from those that make up muscle tissue to
those that form the neurons in our brain. For that reason,

scientists have long hoped that stem cells could be used to
regenerate
failing tissues or organs as an alternative to transplants,
which are expensive, time-consuming, and come with a risk of
rejection. Instead of getting a transplanted kidney from a donor,
for example, a patient could one day hope to receive a sample of
his or her own stem cells, programmed to generate a new kidney.

But stem cells are only widely used today for one procedure: bone
marrow transplants. The transplants are typically used by
leukemia patients who undergo the treatment in conjunction with
chemotherapy as a means of replacing the healthy stem cells that
the chemo has destroyed.

“Right now that’s the only approved use of stem cells,” Allison
Mayle, a cancer researcher at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer
Center, told Business Insider.

In recent years, scientists have been studying how
to use stem
cells to treat a range of other conditions that involve a
specific type of failing cell, such as type 1
diabetes (where the body’s immune system destroys the
pancreas’ insulin-producing beta cells), macular
degeneration, and
heart disease. So far, however, those trials have only
included a very small number of patients; more extensive studies
have only been carried out in lab animals.

Ronna Parsa, a Los Angeles-based orthopedic surgeon, has been
contracted with Forever Labs to do bone marrow stem cell draws
since March. Since then, she’s done roughly five procedures, or
roughly one draw each month. She also banked her own stem cells
with Forever Labs.

“After doing the research I can just see the vast potential for
these types of therapies in the future,” Parsa told Business
Insider. “By freezing my 32-year-old stem cells, hopefully when
I’m 50 or 60 or 70 I can use those.”

Mayle agrees that the therapies could have potential, but she
isn’t sure they’ll come to fruition in time for most patients to
see a benefit.

“Would this be something that’s going to happen in our lifetime?
It’s hard to tell,” Mayle said. “There certainly are things that
could work in the next five to ten years, but they also might
not.”

‘An ace in my pocket’

Nevertheless, stem cell banking is beginning to emerge as a
trend. One
recent report projected that the global stem cell banking
market would grow from $6.3 billion in 2018 to $9.3 billion by
2023. Katakowski wouldn’t share how many customers he’s had so
far, but said most hail from areas with tech meccas, like Silicon
Valley and New York City.

In the US, hundreds of providers currently offer stem cell
banking. A handful also offer unproven anti-aging therapies using
the cells. One such company, Houston-based Celltex Therapeutics,
used to inject patients with retrieved stem cells,
and once treated Texas governor Rick Perry. But
Celltex stopped
offering the service in the US in 2012 after regulators
warned them that they lacked federal approval.

Katakowski said Forever Labs is not offering any stem cell
therapies, just the ability to store the cells until
peer-reviewed science makes proven therapies available.

“In the back of your mind you know you’ve got it,” Katakowski
said. “It gives you a little piece of mind. Is it going to be a
get-out-of-jail-free card or an ace in my pocket? It might.”