We’ve heard of people freezing their eggs, blood and stem cells for use later on, but a health service startup is now enabling patients to freeze their own skin cells for potential future use in diagnostics, therapeutics and regenerative medicine techniques.
Next Healthcare Inc.’s goal is to enable personalized healthcare by providing skin and stem cell banking directly to patients through their medical professional. “Technologies that utilize human skin cells and stem cells are rapidly evolving,” the company says on its website. “These approaches may allow people to one day treat their diseases or conditions with their own cells.”
Through their doctors, patients submit to Next Healthcare a skin and blood sample collected through a small punch biopsy. The company extracts skin cells from the tissue and stores them using cryopreservation, along with a component of the blood that contains stem cells.
Existing companies including AssureImmune, NeoStem and StemCell Backup specialize in collecting and banking stem cells, but Next Healthcare’s addition of storing skin cells appears to be a first.
Skin cells are already being used to treat wounds and burns, and researchers are also turning them into retinal cells, heart cells and neural precursor cells with the hope of creating new therapies. A Children’s Hospital Boston spinoff company called ModeRNA Therapeutics was formed in 2010 to commercialize technology to reprogram human skin cells so that they become stem cells.
According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, the market for personalized medicine in the United States is already worth $232 billion and is forecast to grow 11 percent annually over the next several years.
In two separate U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings this week, Germantown, Maryland-based Next Healthcare disclosed that it raised $170,000 in a round that opened in 2010 and is currently halfway through raising a new $1 million round. The company did not respond to a request for comment.
