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| Young parents bank on stem cells to safeguard baby's future health |
| P B Jayakumar / Mumbai Mar 22, 2009, 00:43 IST |
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They do not hesitate to take loans to fund the expenses.
There is a middle-level manager with a new-generation bank in Chennai who has applied for a Rs 1 lakh loan from his bank to fund the birth of his first baby. The amount is on the higher side even during boom years, more so at this time of salary cuts and job losses. But this manager, reluctant to be identified, is also budgeting for the cost of keeping his baby’s umbilical cord and cord blood in a stem cell bank.
Cord blood is a rich source of blood stem cells, which can be used to treat over 80 diseases, including leukaemia, breast cancer, thalassemia and immunodeficiency.
The father-in-waiting will pay more than Rs 50,000 upfront and Rs 3,500-6,500 every year for storing the stem cells.
“There is a lot of interest among young parents-to-be; cord blood banking as a concept is catching on in India,” said K V Subramaniam, president and chief executive of Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Life Sciences, which established South Asia’s first stem-cell-enriched cord blood repository in Mumbai a few years ago.
There are 10 players in this five-year-old market. Analysts estimate Indian stem cell banks to generate Rs 2,700 crore in revenues by 2010, accounting for 17 per cent of the world market. The current figure is about Rs 100 crore.
“Stem cell banking, which grew to a Rs100 crore industry over the last four years in India with 25,000-35,000 clients, is poised to grow to 200,000-250,000 clients by 2012,” said Mayur Abhaya, executive-director of LifeCell International, India’s first and largest cord blood bank.
LifeCell pioneered the concept in India in 2004, in association with US-based Cryo-Cell International, the largest and oldest stem cell bank, which began in 1992. LifeCell now has 40 collection centres across Asia and plans to open 25 more in India this year, according to Abhaya.
Early this year, Europe’s largest stem cell company, Cryo-Save, opened its first facility in Bangalore with plans to invest over two million euros in expansion. Its target is to corner over 20 per cent of the domestic market in 10-15 months.
CordLife, a leading network of private cord blood banks in the Asia-Pacific, set up shop in India about three months ago. Its facility in Kolkata is purported to be India’s largest and most advanced, with a storage capacity of up to 150,000 cord blood units. It plans to spend over Rs30 crore on expansion in India.
Chennai-based Jeevan Blood Bank and Research Centre opened a public stem cell bank in Chennai last month and tied up with NCRM (Nichi-In Centre for Regenerative Medicine), an Indo-Japanese research institute. Its target is to collect 40,000 samples in five years.
Reliance Life Sciences repository has 5,000 cord blood samples.
Abhaya said 10 stored cord blood samples, including the first sample with LifeCell, have been used by their clients. The procedures were done in hospitals of Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai and in the US.
However, as in every nascent industry, the issue of regulation is rearing its head in stem cells. “New technologies, such as stem cell research, are a grey area in India and we are working to establish a regulatory environment,” K K Tripathi, senior advisor with the government’s department of biotechnology, said on the sidelines of a Ficci seminar in Mumbai.
For stem cell therapy, bio-ethical guidelines have been developed by the Indian Council for Medical Research. Based on this, the Union health ministry is planning a law to regulate this sector.
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