A San Francisco Bay Area company is offering people with embryos left over from in vitro fertilization procedures an opportunity to turn them into personal stem cell lines, a service the company likens to "buying insurance for the future."

StemLifeLine, founded by researchers at the University of California at San Francisco, is believed to be the first company to provide such a service. The selling point is that banking your cells could provide cures for diseases clients may experience down the road if scientists develop any stem cell-based therapies.

Launched in 2005 and backed with an undisclosed amount of angel capital, the company has just begun offering its services commercially. Co-founder Ana Krtolica, who is also the company's CEO and chief scientific officer, said StemLifeLine came about after she and the other founders heard the same feedback from clients of in vitro fertilization clinics. They wanted to know why the clinics couldn't provide stem cell lines for later use, rather than discarding or donating the excess embryos.

"This is like insurance for the future," Krtolica said. But she also said her company is clear with clients that there are no existing stem cell therapies. "You don't want to raise unrealistic expectations," she said. "But the research is very active in this area and there are advanced studies for a few stem cell based therapies that are underway."

Like cord blood banks that market their services as insurance policies against disabling and deadly diseases ahead of science that could deliver on the therapeutic promise, StemLifeLine raises some troubling questions. Is the company, as it says, merely responding to a market demand from IVF patients who want to capture the potential therapeutic benefits of stem cells, or is it taking advantage of a vulnerable public?

Not cheap
StemLifeLine leaves pricing up to its IVF clinic partners, but said the service is offered for below $10,000. The company says the fee includes two years of storage. The company charges $350 a year to store the stem cell lines after that. By comparison, private cord blood banks charge around $2,000 to process and freeze the stem cell-rich blood captured at birth. Because it's difficult to harvest embryonic stem cells from embryos, StemLifeLine suggests that anyone interested in the service devote ten embryos to ensure a high chance of yielding a stem cell line. The IVF embryos are generally frozen at three days. That's before they can form into blastacysts, where embryonic stem cells can be found.

As part of the process, StemLifeLine takes the frozen embryos, thaws them and allows them to develop to the stage from which stem cells can be grown. About half of the embryos will be lost because they fail to develop properly.

StemLifeLine's service are now being offered as one of the options its clients can chose at the Nevada Center for Reproductive Medicine, an IVF clinic affiliated with the University of Nevada, Reno School of Medicine. Clients at the clinic, which charges about $7,000 for the service, actually have used the service as part of the company's initial tests.

"My goal is to provide options for disposition. A patient is in a position to say destroy them, give them to someone else or potentially have a use for them in the future, recognizing it is a potential," said Russell Foulk, medical director of the Nevada Center for Reproductive Medicine and a member of StemLifeLine's board of directors. "I don't think I have to sell people on it. I just present it and let people decide. It's wonderful in that it gives them an option that they didn't have before."

A Young Science
The science surrounding human embryonic stem cells is young. These cells were only first isolated in 1998. Though there is widespread hope that these cells call provide enormous therapeutic benefits to cure a range of maladies such as neurodegenerative conditions, diabetes and spinal cord injuries, there is currently no therapeutic application for these cells.

Asked about the ethics of marketing the service as an insurance policy, StemLifeLine's Krtolica said she wouldn't have started the company if she wasn't convinced that the therapeutic benefits of embryonic stem cells would soon be realized.

"Although we've known about these cells in humans for only the last ten years, the strides in the field have been enormous," she said. "I believe it's a matter of a couple of years before we start seeing some direct therapies using embryonic stem cells."

But others see the development of such services as troubling given the young state of embryonic stem cell research.

"This is all very speculative and I think it basically is kind of preying on people's misconceptions about where we are with stem cell research, especially embryonic stem cell research," said Christopher Thomas Scott, executive director of the Stanford University Program on Stem Cells in Society. "Embryonic stem cell therapies may come to nothing. We hope that they don't, but it's a gamble."