Stem Cell Center

Free consultation

Learn which evidence category your condition falls into

The review is free and without obligation: send your diagnosis reports, recent imaging, laboratory results and current medication list, and you will get a written reply stating which evidence category your condition falls into and whether this center can responsibly offer anything, before any travel is planned.

Evaluation first, and only then a treatment decision

The Stem Cell Center at Biruni Hospital works with mesenchymal stem cells, the cell type most widely studied in immune and degenerative disease, and it treats the evaluation, not the infusion, as its core product. Every candidate goes through a full workup before any treatment decision is made: medical history, imaging, laboratory studies and a structured risk assessment, read jointly with neurology, pulmonology, orthopedics, immunology or ophthalmology as the diagnosis requires. Hematopoietic stem cell transplantation for blood cancers and marrow failure is standard medicine and belongs to the hospital's separate Bone Marrow Transplant Center, just as CAR-T cell therapy has its own dedicated program. This page covers everything else that carries the stem cell label.

Its promise is narrow and checkable. Send your file, and the written reply will place your condition in one of three categories: treatable with established medicine, treatable where trial evidence or regulation supports it, or not treatable with stem cells today. The third answer costs you nothing and is given as readily as the first two.

Which conditions can stem cell therapy actually help?

Mesenchymal stem cells, also called mesenchymal stromal cells, earned their strongest clinical evidence in immune-mediated disease. In 2008, Le Blanc and colleagues published a phase II study in The Lancet of 55 patients with steroid-resistant, severe, acute graft-versus-host disease, a complication of bone marrow transplantation in which donor immune cells attack the patient's own tissues. Thirty patients had a complete response and nine improved after mesenchymal cell infusion, and the complete responders reached 53 percent survival at two years against 16 percent for everyone else in the study. That result made MSC therapy a recognized option in this one situation. It did not make MSCs a cure platform for anything else.

Knee osteoarthritis is the honest middle ground. A 2025 meta-analysis in Arthroscopy pooled nine randomized controlled trials with 671 patients and found that cell injections relieved pain and improved function better than saline, and in some comparisons better than hyaluronic acid. The same analysis found no superiority over corticosteroid injection at three months, no advantage of adipose-derived cells over hyaluronic acid, and no serious adverse events from the cells themselves, though the liposuction used to obtain them caused complications of its own. The authors concluded that cell injections cannot yet replace existing treatments for knee osteoarthritis, and a candid consultation for knee pain has to start from that conclusion.

For neurologic disease the situation has to be stated plainly. Clinical benefit from stem cell therapy has not been established in Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, ALS, cerebral palsy, stroke or spinal cord injury, and the same holds for eye disease, lung disease and most autoimmune conditions. Research is active worldwide because mesenchymal cells modulate immune responses and release anti-inflammatory signals, a reasonable scientific basis for running trials. A registered trial is where such treatment belongs. Somewhere in the world, families are asked every day to pay for these applications on the strength of anecdotes, and an honest center says the word experimental before anyone books a flight.

Hope is not a treatment plan, and it should never be priced like one.

The standard this center holds itself to

International rules for this field exist. The 2021 update of the ISSCR Guidelines for Stem Cell Research and Clinical Translation, published in Stem Cell Reports, warns directly against marketing unproven stem cell interventions to patients outside regulated trials, and Biruni Hospital positions the work of its stem cell center inside that standard rather than around it. Each clinical application is reviewed case by case under Turkey's Ministry of Health framework for cellular therapies.

None of this slows a justified treatment down. It exists to stop an unjustified one.

Five questions to ask any stem cell clinic, including this one

Any clinic selling cellular treatment should survive five questions without changing the subject. Put them to every program you compare, and put them to us.

Our answer sheet is the table below, condition by condition, and the free file review applies it to your individual case.

Stated in prose for the record: hematopoietic transplantation for blood cancers is established medicine handled by a separate center in this hospital. Mesenchymal cell infusion for steroid-resistant graft-versus-host disease is a recognized option resting on phase II evidence. Cell injections for knee osteoarthritis show mixed results against the injections that already exist. Everything else on the list remains experimental.

What stem cell therapy in Turkey costs

Aggregator platforms such as Bookimed and Flymedi list stem cell therapy packages in Turkey at roughly $5,000 to $20,000, moving with the condition treated, the cell source and the number of sessions. Clinic prices for comparable programs in the United States and the United Kingdom commonly run two to four times higher. Both are indicative third-party figures, not quotes.

In this field a price only becomes meaningful after the evidence question has been answered. An effective treatment at $12,000 and an unproven one at $5,000 are not two prices for the same thing: one is a purchase and the other is a wager. So the file review comes first, and an itemized quote follows only when the review supports treating at all.

Days in Istanbul, and the months after you fly home

A stem cell trip is shorter than most medical travel. Mesenchymal cell programs are outpatient or short-stay, so a typical infusion or injection visit means a stay in Istanbul of a few days, with the in-person evaluation completed before treatment, and some protocols add a further session several weeks later. Whatever shape yours takes, the schedule is written into the treatment plan you receive before you book anything. Flying is generally unrestricted after infusion-type treatments, with the team confirming it at discharge.

Follow-up runs remotely over WhatsApp once you are back home, with your local physicians kept in the loop, so the months after treatment are documented rather than left to memory.

Asked before the file is sent

Seven answers, each written to stand on its own.

References

1. Lovell-Badge R, Anthony E, Barker RA, et al. ISSCR Guidelines for Stem Cell Research and Clinical Translation: The 2021 update. Stem Cell Reports. 2021;16(6):1398-1408.
2. Le Blanc K, Frassoni F, Ball L, et al. Mesenchymal stem cells for treatment of steroid-resistant, severe, acute graft-versus-host disease: a phase II study. Lancet. 2008;371(9624):1579-1586.
3. Han JH, Jung M, Chung K, et al. Intra-articular Stromal Vascular Fraction and Mesenchymal Stem Cell Injections Show Variable Efficacy and Higher Potential Complications Compared to Corticosteroid and Hyaluronic Acid in Treatment of Knee Osteoarthritis: A Meta-analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials. Arthroscopy. 2025;41(9):3666-3680.e13.