Cells grown in a laboratory for use on patients allow treatments for a vast variety of conditions such as Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, diabetes spinal cord damage and various cancers including leukaemia.

Current harvesting techniques include the extraction of stem cells from human embryos and foetuses. TriStem's retrodifferentiation process does not require any human embryos or foetuses and, therefore, bypasses sensitive ethical and related legal issues.

The use of a patient's own blood cells ensures a perfect tissue match and removes the need for a donor. The use of material from another human can run the risk of immune system rejection. The retrodifferentiation process eliminates this risk as all the retrodifferentiated stem cells come from the patient, who effectively acts as his or her own donor.

The use of adult cells to create stem cells is less expensive and less time consuming than existing harvesting techniques. In addition, the new process produces huge numbers of stem cells when compared with existing technologies.

The method of obtaining the retrodifferentiated stem cells does not involve invasive surgical procedures. The starting material can be blood, the most accessible tissue in the body, and which is simple to extract through a short venepuncture procedure.