Will regenerative medicine reduce health care spending?

The potential benefits of regenerative medicine – in improved health care and economic savings – are enormous. The annual direct costs of organ replacement are now about $350 billion worldwide, or about 8 percent of global health care spending. These costs include therapies that keep people alive (such as kidney dialysis), implanted replacement devices, and relatively few (due to lack of donors) organ transplants.¹

By way of comparison, some examples of conditions and diseases that could be cured by regenerative medicine and their current cost of treatment include:

• Heart valve replacement – 250,000 patients annually at a cost of $27 billion
• Heart disease or stroke – 950,000 patients annually at a cost of $351 billion²
• Diabetes – 17 million patients at a cost of $132 billion³ 

In the U.S. alone current healthcare costs are more than $1.5 trillion, or 13 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).⁴ With a large and aging baby boomer population the number of senior citizens in the U.S. will double by the year 2040, for a total of 70 million. As much as 25 percent of the U.S. GDP could then be devoted to health care.

A large percentage of U.S. health care costs is attributable to tissue loss or organ failure, with approximately 8 million surgical procedures being performed annually in the U.S. to treat these disorders⁵, as well as recurring treatments for chronic diseases and their subsequent complications. One such example is insulin therapy for Type 1 diabetes and glucose therapy for Type 2 diabetes. While insulin and glucose can help patients manage diabetes, these therapies do not cure diabetes, nor do they prevent long-term complications, such as kidney failure. Despite insulin, glucose and dialysis treatments, diabetes was the underlying cause of more than 68,000 deaths in the U.S. and the contributing cause of death for more than another 141,000 individuals.⁶  

Because regenerative medicine focuses on functional restoration of damaged tissues, not abatement or moderation of symptoms, this field will cut health care costs. Without regenerative medicine, the U.S. faces a future of skyrocketing healthcare costs and inefficient treatments.

^{1Lysaght, Michael J. Reyes, Joyce. “The growth of tissue engineering.” Tissue Engineering 7 (2001): 485-49
2Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Preventing Heart Disease and Stroke. 2 December 2003.
3Hogan, P., Dall, T., Nikolov, P. “Economic costs of diabetes in the U.S. in 2002.” Diabetes Care 26 (2003): 917-932
4U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States. “National health expenditures by type, 1990-2000.” P.92
5Niklason, Laura E. Langer, Robert. “Prospects for organ and tissue replacement.” JAMA 285 (2001): 573-576
6National Diabetes Statistics. National Diabetes Information Clearinghouse (NDIC). 25 September 2003}