Hampton Roads parents, and others, have a new opportunity for storing some of the basic building blocks of human beings for use in treating diseases and conditions all over the body.
The Telomerix Stem Cell Biobank recently opened in Chesapeake and says it is the first private stem cell bank in Virginia. The facility collects, preserves and stores stem cells in large tanks for donor families to use for possible future treatments and research.
“The stem cell lab was, for us, a necessity for this area,” said Dr. Christian Perez, medical director for Telomerix and the adjoining Procreate Fertility Center of Southwest Virginia.
At a basic level, stem cells are special building blocks for bodies — cells that have yet to differentiate into a particular type of cell, such as skin cells or blood cells, and so have the potential to become the type of cell a body needs. Both adults and embryos produce them. In adults, the cells are located in places like bone marrow. Embryos produce the cells in an inner cell mass a few stages after conception.
The types of stem cells stored in the Chesapeake facility come from newborns in the form of umbilical cord blood and tissue.
On a foggy Tuesday in October, lab manager Ashley Johnson demonstrated how the process works. First, she took a bag of cord blood and hooked it up to an extraction machine to separate out the stem cells. Then, she injected a cryo-preserving fluid into the bag of cells, and placed them in another machine, which freezes the cells at a controlled rate for a few hours. Then, with a “whoosh” and a flood of smoke-like vapor, she opened the lid to a liquid nitrogen-cooled tank, and placed the bag of cells in it, storing them at minus-193 degrees Celsius. The tank can store at least 1,000 samples of cells, Johnson said.
Right now, stem cell therapies can be used to treat a variety of illnesses, Perez said, like leukemia, lymphoma and other types of cancer. And potential treatments include, she said, repairing damage to someone’s heart after a heart attack.
“We can inject some heart stem cells to renew and restore the function,” Perez said, explaining how a treatment currently being researched might work.
In the future, stem cells could be used to treat type 1 diabetes. Researchers are also looking into the use of stem cells for treatment of arthritis, strokes, infertility and many other ailments. Some researches are studying the use of stem cells to treat the damage caused by COVID-19, Perez said.
Seeing the need in Virginia for a private stem cell bank, Perez said it made sense for the fertility clinic, which also has locations in Virginia Beach and Newport News, to expand into the space. They already deal with processing and storing sperm and eggs and handing other lab procedures related to fertility treatments.
“For us, it was really natural to go into stem cell biology,” Perez said.
It took around two years for the clinic to plan and build the lab, and Perez said the center invested around $1 million in the facility. Eventually, the stem cell bank will support around 10 positions, including lab technicians, marketing employees and administration positions.
The cost for stem cell collection is $1,600 for either cord blood or cord tissue and includes a year of storage. It costs $2,800 to collect both blood and tissue cells. Costs for additional time start at $180 for an additional year of blood or tissue storage.
Anyone who decides to stop using the service can transfer the cells to another facility, send them to their physician, donate them or discard them, Perez said.
Trevor Metcalfe, 757-222-5345, trevor.metcalfe@insidebiz.com
