French firm has an elixir of life

A FRENCH company has come up with what could be the technology for immortality – with a way to collect and store stem cells so that people can “benefit, if needed, from future regenerative medicine treatments as soon as they become available”.

Cellectis chief executive André Choulika said it would be like doing a biological version of a computer back-up that could be used in the future to “restore” the body to a previous state with the new medical enhancements working properly.

It will allow the company to use the stored gene sample to apply future cures: if a patient develops a problem later in life the gene sample can be modified to avoid it and then new stem cells created to repair the patient.

The company, which says it has 13 years’ experience in genome engineering and stem cells, uses “induced pluripotent stem cells” (iPS) generated from a skin sample which can then be used to create different functional cell types. It is already working on regenerative therapies for leukemia and type 1 diabetes.

Its new service, called Scéil, has been launched in Singapore and, soon, in Dubai because these countries allow cell sampling, whereas France imposes strict conditions whereby all future uses of a sample have to be specified.

That means that the service, which costs $60,000 to sign up plus a $500 a year maintenance tariff, will not be available in France.