“If you’re a student and you’re living on a $700 monthly budget, an extra $200 might be worth it,” Bernau says. “If they work 10 hours for me, I don’t mind paying them $200. I am.”
Many countries have rules that prevent people from receiving compensation for donating tissue. In the UK, it is illegal to pay for blood, plasma or other tissue donations, although donors may be reimbursed for costs and lost profits. In Sweden, as in several other EU countries, donors can be compensated for their time, but they are not allowed to receive remuneration.
“Should they receive any compensation?” asks Hank Greeley, a law professor at Stanford University who specializes in ethical and legal issues in the biological sciences. “Depending on who you ask, that may or may not be a sin. But it’s a venial sin, not a mortal sin.” In the United States, donating sperm, eggs, and blood can be rewarded. Masu.
What makes stem cells different is the high cost of treatment. Burnough said each donation yields about 50 ml of tissue containing mesenchymal stem cells to be used in treatment. These cells are then purified and replicated in Cellcolab’s laboratory space, ultimately yielding approximately 200 therapeutic doses of stem cells per donation. Assuming each treatment costs $16,500, a single donation could be used for more than $3 million worth of treatments. Burneau said they currently have 15 to 20 donors a year.
Of course, the cells are not a contributing factor to the cost of stem cell therapy. For a $25,000 intravenous treatment, about $10,000 of that cost goes toward conducting the clinical trial, with the remainder going toward extracting, replicating, storing, and transporting the stem cells, Burneau said. It is said that it will be allocated. He points out that the overall focus of his startup is to lower the need for donors and the cost of stem cells by producing more stem cells from each donation.
“It’s very simple economics of scale,” he says. “Our goal is to bring prices down significantly over the next 10 years. We hope to find step changes that will allow us to produce more cells from one donor. Masu.”
For Greeley, the biggest problem with stem cell therapy is the treatment itself. “My main concern is its effectiveness,” he says. The FDA has warned people about stem cell treatments that are not approved in the United States. “There is a lot of misleading information on the internet, including statements about the conditions these products can be used to treat,” the agency warned in a 2020 post. “The FDA believes that many patients seeking treatments and therapies are being sold illegally, unproven to be safe or effective, and in some cases with serious safety issues that put patients at risk. I am being misled by information about products that may be available.
Greeley isn’t too upset that donors paid $200 for a treatment that would ultimately cost millions of dollars. “Welcome to capitalism.”
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