TREMENDOUS. But seriously, I'm curious, how many cells do you end up getting from each patient and what fraction of those actual survive the freeze / thaw procedure?
Roughly 20M MNCs/ml but there is variability. In terms of CFUs, we haven't discerned a difference between the same sample when comparing a frozen aliquot to a fresh one. We can greatly adversely affect the recovery modifying our culture conditions, however.
Yes, there is, and that is the plan. You can expand what we collect to exceed the number of cells in your own body. It's my plan to expand both my blood/immune-building hematopoietic stem cells and my bone/connective tissue-building mesenchymal stem cells to ridiculous numbers, and then to freeze those in many individual chambers. As it stands, we store your cells in 3 large chambers, and 4-5 small ones, so that you can draw up a fraction of them without thawing the rest.
I'm actually about to head in to a procedure. b_b, can you reply?