In a recent study, ten men with erectile dysfunction, who had not responded to the maximum doses of Viagra and similar drugs, had a single injection of their own stem cells into their penile tissue.
The treatment led to a three-fold reduction in the pain and urinary symptoms experienced by patients with interstitial cystitis, a condition affecting around half a million Britons, nine out of ten of them women.
Around 5,000 men a year in the UK undergo a radical prostatectomy (where the whole prostate and a small amount of surrounding tissue is removed) to try to get rid of cancer.