LOS ANGELES, May 7, 2002 (LSN.ca) – A plastic surgeon is urging liposuction patients to store their fat since it is “rich in stem cells.” Dr. Peter Fodor, a plastic surgeon at Century City Hospital near Los Angeles presented his latest research last Wednesday at the annual meeting of the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery in Las Vegas. Fodor compared the stem cell supply in fat to that in bone marrow noting that every 100 cubic centimeters of bone marrow yields up to 10,000 stem cells, but the same amount of fat contains a million stem cells. Reuters Health reports that Fodor and his team extracted stem cells from liposuction specimens of 10 patients and grew them into more fat cells as well as into bone, cartilage, skeletal muscle and nerve cells. He noted that using stem cells collected from a patient’s own body eliminates the risk of rejection when later reintroduced. It also avoids the ethical issues involved in using stem cells derived from embryos or aborted baby tissue. One of Fodor’s colleagues, Dr. Marc Hedrick, is the CEO of StemSource in Thousand Oaks, California, which banks stem cells from liposuction patients. Hedrick expects fees to be around $2,000 for processing and an initial 5 years of storage with storage at $100 per year thereafter.
See the Reuters Health coverage: https://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=594&e=1&cid=594&u=/nm/20020501/hl_nm/liposuction_cells_1