Looking for His glorious appearing! Titus 2:13

Claiming to be a world first, the service has been developed by Scéil, part of Cellectis, a French genome technology company on the Euronext stock market.

Launched in Switzerland, Dubai, Singapore and the US two months ago, it involves taking cells from a small sample of the skin under local anaesthetic at a dermatologist, shipping them to Scéil’s laboratories and “rebooting” them into induced pluripotent stem (IPS) cells, otherwise simply known as stem cells.

These are frozen at -180C and stored to potentially repair damaged organs, rebuild tissue and fight disease in the future. The service is based on Nobel Prize-winning medical research by Prof Shinya Yamanaka in Kyoto, Japan.

“Shinya Yamanaka broke a paradigm of science,” says Cellectis chief executive André Choulika. “He discovered that you can take any cell of the body, put a cocktail of things inside and it then forgets the state it is in and comes back to the first stage of life, nine months before birth.

“These cells have the potentiality to give any kind of tissue of your organism. You freeze time at the second a sample is taken and the cells won’t age after this moment.”

Scéil’s service differs from cord blood banking, in which blood is taken from the umbilical cord for later use to reconstitute blood. “We believe it’s going to be very popular with a certain class of people who have everything they want but cannot go against ageing,” said Mr Choulika. “This is expensive, so only reserved for a certain class of people who can afford it.