Tuesday, February 5, 2013

STEM CELL BANKING: LIFECELL INTERNATIONAL

Being the pioneer in stem cell banking in India, LifeCell does have a head start. But these are early days in this industry and digging beyond the iceberg’s tip is going to be the real challenge by Virat Bahri

Abhaya was aware that the numbers would be hard to come by initially, but was optimistic that things would look up once the company achieved critical mass, which he defined as 5000 client additions annually. The company added 7500 clients last year; taking its total tally to around 25,000. This is not even the tip of the iceberg, however, considering that India has an annual birth rate of close to 25 million. Abhaya himself admits that a company in China typically adds around 50,000 clients every year with prices at the same level or higher (as India). Consulting firm PwC tells B&E that India’s stem cell market is growing at a rate of 15% per annum and is estimated to hit US$ 540 million by year 2010, while the global stem cell market is expected to touch US $ 20 billion mark.

The umbilical stem cell banking industry stands at a size of around Rs.1 billion in India and is projected to triple in size over the next three years. Nevertheless its growth from a small base and one cannot ignore the fact that scaling up remains a challenge. According to Abhaya, the Indian government can follow the US government with two policy initiatives that can encourage the growth of this industry. The first is the Cord Blood Awareness and Education Act in the US, which makes it mandatory for every practitioner to inform expecting parents about the benefits of cord blood banking. In India, a lot of physicians can’t even explain it properly to patients yet. The second is that the US government has set up a National Stem Cell Bank, which is a repository for human pluripotent stem cell lines listed on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Stem Cell Registry. Being listed, these lines are available for federally funded research in the US.

PwC projects that there will be around 9.5 million hospitalized cases in India due to cardiac ailments, oncology and diabetes with a estimated ailment market size of Rs.720 billion. Although stem cell banking has been positioned by LifeCell as a lifestyle product, true growth of the industry hinges on the success of stem cell treatment in treating several life threatening ailments.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri
and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

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