Players storing children’s stem cells as “repair kit”: paper

LONDON (Reuters) – Some leading English soccer players are
storing stem cells from their newborn babies as a potential
future treatment for their own career-threatening sports
injuries, according to a report in the UK Sunday Times
newspaper.

Players are freezing the cells taken from the umbilical
cord blood of their babies as a possible future cure for
cartilage and ligament problems. Stem cells can be used to
regenerate damaged organs and tissue because they are the
earliest form of cells.

The paper quoted one unnamed Premier League player from a
north west club as saying: “We decided to store our new baby’s
stem cells for possible future therapeutic reasons, both for
our children and possibly for myself.

“As a footballer, if you’re prone to injury it can mean the
end of your career, so having your stem cells – a repair kit if
you like – on hand makes sense.”

The player is one of five who have frozen their children’s
stem cells with Liverpool-based CryoGenesis International
(CGI), a commercial stem cell bank.

The Times said that in the past five years more than 11,000
British parents have paid up to 1,500 pounds ($2,837) to store
their babies’ stem cells in order to grow tissue, should their
children become ill.

Thousands of successful umbilical cord blood stem cell
transplants have already been carried out to treat children
with severe blood conditions or immune disorders.