Timelines For Regenerative Therapies
The common wisdom on widespread availability of stem cell based regenerative therapies for age-damage tissue is repeated in this CNN article: "stem cell therapies for degenerative disorders afflicting major organs such as the heart and liver could be available within 10 years. ... What we're going to see is one or two patients being helped in some way and people are going to hail it as the end of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. But it's going to be a slow process. We hear an awful lot of hype about what stem cells can do but in reality there's still a lot of work to do ... the pace of progress would depend on increasing the number of suitable cells made available to scientists - and warned that a great deal of 'fundamental research' still had to be done before stem cell applications were ready for clinical trial." The first of the first generation autologous and transplant stem cell therapies are moving ahead successfully today, but sophistication, reliability and better economics take time.
Link: http://edition.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/08/01/feature.stemcells/