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American Morning

The Big Question: Can Your Fat Save Someone's Life?

Aired May 10, 2002 - 08:41   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
JACK CAFFERTY, CNN ANCHOR: The Big Question for this hour, can your fat save someone's life? We've heard of blood drives. Well, how about fat drives perhaps next? It's a study that reports unwanted fat cells removed during liposuction may produce valuable stem cells. If you're considering joining the almost 400,000 people who get liposuction every year, there's another reason to consider doing besides just the whim to get slim.

Here's CNN medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen with the details. Time to stock up on those Krispy Kremes.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Finding the contours of her back.

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): That's a nice way of saying this woman want to get rid of the fat on her back. And that sucking sound you hear is her fat being vacuumed through this tube and into this canister.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Looks like we have about 400 ccs of pure fat in the container.

COHEN: And why would she want to save her fat, much less box it up? Because this company, Stemsource, says they've found stem cells in fat. Stem cells are essentially blank cells, which, if the research pans out, could be turned into virtually any body part.

DR. JOHN PERLMAN, PLASTIC SURGEON: Imagine replacing a section of the brain that's been destroyed by a stroke or a portion of the heart muscle that is no longer functioning after a heart attack.

COHEN: Several scientists we talked to are skeptical about Stemsource's claim that their fat cells can yield medical treatments. The National Institutes of Health says more promising are stem cells found in embryos, left over by the thousands in in vitro fertilization clinics. The NIH says stem cells from sources other than embryos "hold real promise, but there are significant limitations to what we may or may be able to accomplish with them.

The research at Stemsource continues, as the company tries to convince liposuction patient to pay to store their fat.

DR. MARC HEDRICK, CEO, STEMSOURCE: The key think about fat is you can get so much of it.

COHEN: Stem Source say patients like this woman pay around $1,700 too $2,000 to process and store their fat. Not every lypo patient opts to keep their fat around.

PERLMAN: We leave it up to each individual, because it's possible that it won't be useful in the future.

COHEN: This woman thinks it will be, and her fat will sit in a freezer in a lab in California, possibly forever.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CAFFERTY: So, Elizabeth, is it time for us to all bulk up a little bit and have the fat liposuctioned out and frozen with the idea of maybe saving somebody else's life or our own someday?

COHEN: If you want to dish out the $2,000 to store your fat -- you don't look like you have much fat. But if you want to dish out that kind of money, that's fine. If you want to have liposuction anyway, storing the fat certainly isn't going to hurt you.

But we have to remember this is all very preliminary. There are no guarantees, as the doctor said in the piece, that this is going to go anywhere. Stem cell research in general is in its infant stages, and this is a particularly new area of it. So who knows, you may store this and spend the money just to find out that the stem cells really aren't very workable.

CAFFERTY: That would be under the category of really having extra money, wouldn't it, to do that? I mean, you really got extra money. Is there anything else in human body fat besides stem cells that might be of interest to the medical community?

COHEN: Well, stem cells can be found in other parts of the body besides fat. For example, stem cells have been found in blood. They've been found in skin. They've been found in bone marrow. And of course they're also found in those embryos that are in in vitro fertilization clinics. So fat is not the only source for stem cells, and in fact, these other sources that I just named, the research on them has been going on far them far longer than the research on fats. Stem cells are so promising that many companies now are racing to get stem cells, and this is just one of the contestants that we just saw just now.

CAFFERTY: Interesting stuff.

Thanks, Elizabeth. Enjoy the weekend.

COHEN: You, too. Elizabeth Cohen, joining us from Atlanta.

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