Cellino launches Reservoir: for $4995, adults can have blood collected at home and their immune cells frozen and stored in their name for the first year

Cellino launches Reservoir: for $4995, adults can have blood collected at home and their immune cells frozen and stored in their name for the first year

On October 15, Massachusetts-based Cellino, which automates cell production for therapies, launched Reservoir in selected regions of the US for adults aged 18 and older. Storage costs $270 per year from the second year onward. First-year pricing at partner clinics varies by clinic.

The company collects 60 milliliters of blood from each client and isolates immune cells: a mixture of T-cells, B-cells, natural killer cells, and monocytes. It expects each collection to yield five vials containing five million cells each. According to the press release, the vials are kept below −150 °C at an FDA-registered storage facility and released only at the client's direction, with a licensed physician involved. Cellino co-founder and CEO Nabiha Saklayen describes Reservoir as a service for preservation rather than diagnosis: clients receive confirmation of storage but no report on the condition of their cells.

The service aims to preserve immune cells as they are at the time of collection. Saklayen tells Longevity.Technology: “Cells collected at 60 differ in composition from those collected at 30: the proportion of naive T-cells declines over time, and mutations accumulate.” Naive T-cells have yet to encounter their target and can respond to a new threat. A 2014 study of 17 182 people found that mutations in blood cells become more common with age: alterations in genes associated with blood cancer were detected in 9,5% of participants aged 70–79 and were rare in those under 40. Alex Morgan of Khosla Ventures, an investor in Cellino, explains: “You can always collect more cells later, but you cannot go back and collect the cells you have today.”

Patients' own cells are already used in CAR-T therapy, which treats certain cancers with modified versions of their T-cells. Cells for this treatment are collected by apheresis, a procedure in which a machine separates them from the rest of the blood. Reservoir's five vials contain fewer cells than an apheresis collection yields. Saklayen acknowledges: “This is a deliberate trade-off: a routine blood draw in place of a procedure that takes hours.” Longevity.Technology describes the five vials as a “seed rather than a harvest”: the sample's value depends on future methods for expanding and reprogramming cells.

Cellino also works with patients' own cells. It is developing automated production of personalized cell therapies, in which blood or skin cells are reprogrammed into stem cells and then grown into the required tissues. Saklayen attributes the launch of Reservoir to demand: people who closely follow their health began asking to preserve their cells. Longevity.Technology suggests that, for a company automating cell production, the age of the starting cells may one day matter as much as the machines that process them. Cellino's founders declined to speculate.

According to Forbes, early Reservoir clients include Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla; Saklayen has also stored her own cells. Forbes suggests that the cells could still prove useful twenty years from now. At the rates listed on the website, twenty years of the service would cost approximately 10 100 dollars.

Longevity.Technology notes that private cord blood banks sold parents a similar form of insurance for the future. In 2014, Scientific American reported, citing an industry report, that less than 3% of collected cord blood in the US had been used, with an even smaller proportion used from private banks. Whether Reservoir proves to be “a farsighted investment or an expensive exercise in biological nostalgia” depends, in Longevity.Technology's assessment, “on science that has yet to be done.”