As stated by Dr. Le Van Dong, deputy head of the Immunology Department of the Vietnam Military Medical University, in the case of a patient with spinal cord injury, cirrhosis, blood-related diseases, tumors, coronary thrombosis, diabetes, stroke, or Parkinson’s disease, stem cell transplant is the ideal answer.
Up till March 2012, the National Institute of Hematology and Blood Transfusion had already performed stem cell transplant on 44 cases. The success rate for multiple myeloma and bone marrow are 70 percent and 75 percent respectively. After six years of treatment, some patients still lead a normal life, which is quite an impressive result.
Despite its usefulness, stem cells are not getting adequate attention from the public. In three years, MekoStem has received only 600 requests from healthy people to store stem cells for future use and have collected 300 samples from donors.
Statistics show that out of ten thousand samples of stem cells, there are only a few compatible ones that can be used. The compatible rate between parents and children is merely 50 percent, and between siblings is 25 to 100 percent.
“The more stem cell samples we can get from donors, the more successful we will be in curing patients,” said Pham Van Phuc of the Laboratory for Research and Application of Stem Cells (under the management of the HCMC University of Science).
The biggest obstacle, according to Phuc, is finance. It costs about $2,000 to analyze, process, and then store stem cells in the first year and then $150 per year for the following years, making the total fee of $5,000 for 18 years.
However, this price is still quite cheap, only VND15,000 per day ($0.72), for the magical benefits of results gotten from stem cells Stem cells are biological cells found in all multi-cellular organisms that can divide (through mitosis) and differentiate specialized cell types and self-renew to produce more stem cells, thus enable them to replace any sick, injured, or old cell tissues.
Previous page
Back to top
