Pluristem's Market: ...There are presently between 40,000 to 50,000 bone marrow transplants performed annually in the United States and in Europe. This does not include the number of bone marrow transplants performed in other countries. Of the 40,000 to 50,000 bone marrow transplants performed, only 5,000 are performed on babies and children. Most of these transplants are allogeneic, which require locating donors with compatible hematopoietic stem cells. Taking into account that only one in three patients actually finds a compatible donor, the number of potential bone marrow transplants is estimated to exceed 150,000 annually. Based on these statistics, the Company believes that the existing methods of transplanting human bone marrow are still far from reaching an ideal level of success.
Presently, the standard bone marrow transplant procedure costs approximately $100,000 per patient. This translates into approximately $5 billion annually that patients and their medical insurers around the world are spending for the procedure alone. In approximately 15% to 20% of the patients, a sorting procedure of the stem cells is also frequently performed at a cost of $70,000 to manage the risk of incompatibility between donor and patient stem cells. This adds a further $700 million to the current spending on bone marrow transplants in the United States. Combining these figures with similar expenditures in Europe, the current worldwide spending on bone marrow transplants is estimated to exceed $7 billion per year.
There are well over twenty umbilical cord blood banks in the world, most of them located in the United States. In 2001, they collected and stored cryo-preserved (frozen) CB from some 34,000 to 36,000 donors and they project that the annual rate of growth will be over 15%. Due to the increased use of umbilical CB HSCs in bone marrow transplants, the number of CB banks around the world will also grow significantly. In the near future, in developed countries, it is expected that CB will be drawn at the time of every birth and stored for later use.
The Company believes that the stem cell expansion services that will be made available by the PluriX™ Bioreactor system, together with proper marketing efforts, will double the existing growth rate of the number of CB donors for personal use, i.e., parents storing the CB for their children’s future. This will also provide a full base of hematopoietic stem cell donor opportunities to patients throughout the world. The Company projects that the global market for the provision of stem cell expansion services can reach $8 billion.
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