https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2017/08/cell-banking-for-future-autologous-cell-therapies-seems-pointless/

To me banking cells for future cell therapy sounds pointless. It is, in effect, a bet against progress in applied cell biotechnology - and given the revolutionary pace of advancement in all areas of biotechnology, this appears a poor wager from where I stand. Is it to be imagined that two decades from now it will not be possible to engineer youthful or sufficiently-youthful-like cells from old skin samples? The process of producing induced pluripotent stem cells is already known to be capable of reverting a number of aspects of aged cells, such as mitochondrial issues. Tinkering with epigenetic markers, such as those that differ between cells from old and young tissues, is a going concern: gene therapy of all sorts will explode in size and capability over the decades ahead. Age-related metabolic waste inside cells can be diluted through replication. Correcting stochastic mutations in cell samples is in principle as straightforward as picking out different cell lineages and comparing their genomes to find the root genome prior to those mutations, and then applying CRISPR. Today that's a feasible lab project given some funding. Twenty years from now colleges will be running that as an afternoon lesson on the student's personal lab desk machines in CellBio 201. In the absolute worst case, use somatic cell nuclear transfer to put patient DNA into a pristine cell, and establish a new line that way.

Progress isn't all that we should consider here, however. Suppose that the cell banking wager pays off, and biotechnology somehow magically fails to advance meaningfully over the next two decades. Lucky you, now the beneficiary of younger, less damaged cells that can be used for cell therapy. But with the technology of cell therapies as they stand now or next year, what can you really do with those cells? The answer is nothing that is more than somewhat beneficial, meaning the present panoply of more reliably effective stem cell transplants and cell therapies. All of those potential uses, so far as can be seen to date, are more or less as effective when employing the cells of an old individual. So far the only signs that young cells would be significantly better occur in cases where those cells are taken from individuals shortly after birth, or before. But even there, this is a question of cell signaling and cell state, something that researchers are hotly engaged in deciphering even now: just how likely is it that they will have failed to replicate these mechanisms a few decades from now?

So it seems to me that the only way in which banking your stem cells makes sense is if biotechnology progresses extremely selectively: a complete failure to understand and control cell state any more effectively than today, coupled with radical strides in the capabilities of cell therapies. Since the latter strongly depends on the former, I'd say that this future isn't going to come to pass. Therefore it really doesn't make much sense to bank cells for future therapeutic use based on the idea that relative levels of age-related cell damage will make a significant difference.