PRP vs Stem Cell Therapy: The Differences, the Evidence and the Prices

Clinics in Bangkok often list PRP and stem cell therapy side by side, sometimes in the same package, and the two names get used as if they were versions of one thing. They are not. One is a concentrate of your own blood prepared while you wait. The other is a cell product, often grown in a laboratory, that Thailand now regulates as a medicine. This guide sets out what each one is, what the published trials and guidelines say, and what the two cost according to published Bangkok listings, so you can ask a doctor the right questions before you compare quotes.

What PRP actually is

PRP stands for platelet-rich plasma. Blood is mostly a liquid called plasma, and it carries red cells, white cells and platelets. Platelets are best known for clotting, but they also contain proteins called growth factors that play a part in how injuries heal.

To make PRP, a clinician draws a sample of your blood and spins it in a centrifuge. The spinning separates the platelets from the other blood cells and concentrates them. According to OrthoInfo, the patient site of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, the platelet concentration in PRP can be 5 to 10 times greater than in normal blood. The concentrate is then injected into the injured area, usually in the same visit.

Two things follow from this. PRP contains no stem cells. And nothing is cultured or multiplied in a lab: what goes in is your own blood, processed for a few minutes. OrthoInfo also says that it is not exactly clear how PRP works. The idea rests on laboratory work: a higher growth factor concentration may speed up healing. Whether that happens in patients is not settled.

What stem cell therapy means in a Bangkok clinic

When a Bangkok clinic offers stem cell therapy for a knee, a back or an ageing program, it almost always means mesenchymal stem cells. These come from three main sources: your own bone marrow, your own fat, or donated umbilical cord tissue. Our guide on what mesenchymal stem cells are explains the sources and the difference between your own cells and donor cells.

The important step for this comparison is culture. Many protocols grow the collected cells in a laboratory for days or weeks to multiply their number before injection or infusion. That is the step PRP never involves. It is also the step that changed the legal picture in Thailand: a 2026 ministerial decree classifies cell products that have been through more than minimal processing, including culture-expanded mesenchymal stem cells, as medicines that need Thai FDA registration and Good Manufacturing Practice compliance, as reported by Nation Thailand. Our legal guide covers the rules in detail.

Side by side

Every entry in the last row is a third-party published range, not a partner clinic's price.

What the evidence says for PRP

PRP is the better studied of the two by a wide margin, which is not the same as saying the studies agree.

OrthoInfo summarises the evidence by condition. It rates the evidence best for chronic tendon problems, especially tennis elbow, and says PRP has shown no significant benefit for fractures and little or no benefit when added to rotator cuff or ACL surgery. On knee osteoarthritis it describes a growing literature, which is the condition where the largest and most careful trial to date points the other way.

That trial is RESTORE, published in JAMA in November 2021. Researchers in Sydney and Melbourne enrolled 288 people aged 50 or older with mild to moderate knee osteoarthritis. Half received three weekly injections of leukocyte-poor PRP made with a commercial kit, half received three injections of saline, and nobody involved knew which was which. After 12 months, knee pain scores had changed by 2.1 points in the PRP group and 1.8 points in the saline group, a difference the authors report as not statistically significant. Cartilage volume on MRI changed by 1.4 percent and 1.2 percent, again no meaningful difference. Of 31 secondary outcomes, 29 showed no difference between the groups. The authors concluded that the findings do not support the use of PRP for the management of knee osteoarthritis.

For soft tissue injuries, the Cochrane review by Moraes and colleagues (2014) pooled 19 small trials with 1,088 participants covering rotator cuff repair, tennis elbow, ACL reconstruction, patellar and Achilles tendinopathy and Achilles rupture repair. Function showed no difference between PRP and control at three months, six months or one year. Short-term pain showed a small reduction that the authors judged of marginal clinical significance. Six pooled rotator cuff surgery trials showed no significant difference in long-term function. Adverse events were reported at low and comparable rates in both groups. The review's conclusion: currently insufficient evidence to support platelet-rich therapies for musculoskeletal soft tissue injuries, and a need to standardise how PRP is prepared, because the methods varied from trial to trial.

Guideline bodies sit in the same cautious place. NICE, the UK's health technology body, says current evidence on PRP injections for knee osteoarthritis raises no major safety concerns, but that the evidence on efficacy is limited in quality, so the procedure should only be used with special arrangements for clinical governance, consent, and audit or research. The 2021 clinical practice guideline of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons on knee osteoarthritis, summarised in its own journal in 2022, highlighted the need for better research into PRP, including which patients and which severity of arthritis are being studied.

What the evidence says for stem cell injections

Here the record is thinner, not stronger. The International Society for Stem Cell Research, the main scientific body in the field, says in its patient guide that beyond certain blood cancers and immune conditions "there are very few conditions for which stem cell-based therapies are established". Treatments offered outside a trial it calls unproven: they "have not been evaluated in a rigorous, multi-step clinical trial process and thus have not been shown to be effective or safe" and "can cause physical, psychological, and/or financial harm".

The clearest regulatory fact is this: the US FDA has approved one mesenchymal stem cell product, remestemcel-L (Ryoncil), in December 2024, for steroid-refractory acute graft-versus-host disease in children two months and older, a complication of bone marrow transplants. That approval was based on a single-arm trial of 54 patients and says nothing about knees, backs or ageing. No mesenchymal stem cell product has been approved by the FDA for a joint or an ageing indication.

In Thailand, the Medical Council's position and the 2026 decree, both covered in our legal guide, mean that a Bangkok clinic offering cultured cells for a joint should be able to tell you whether the product is registered and whether the treatment is standard care, part of an approved research protocol, or neither.

PRP therapy price versus stem cell prices in Bangkok

Because PRP is a short in-clinic procedure with no lab stage, it is priced per session and costs a fraction of a cell product.

Bookimed's Bangkok listing for PRP therapy, updated on 27 September 2026, shows prices from US$260 to US$870 depending on the treatment area and the tube technology used, with package prices up to US$3,700 where PRP is combined with stem cell treatment. The same site's Bangkok stem cell listing shows general programs from about US$1,500 to US$5,400, average US$3,500, and our cost guide sets those figures against single-joint and whole-body protocols from a second source.

Two cautions when you compare. First, the number of sessions changes everything: three PRP sessions at US$600 cost more than one basic stem cell protocol at US$1,500, so ask for the total, not the per-session price. Second, a package that bundles PRP with stem cells makes it impossible to see what you are paying for each part. Ask for the two to be itemised.

Which one fits which injury?

That is a question for a licensed doctor who has read your scans, not for a website, and this guide does not answer it. What the sources above let you do is walk into that conversation knowing three things.

For knee osteoarthritis, the largest placebo-controlled PRP trial found no benefit over saline, NICE calls the PRP evidence limited in quality, and the AAOS guideline calls for better research. For tendon problems such as tennis elbow, OrthoInfo rates the PRP evidence as the most favourable, while Cochrane still calls it insufficient overall. For mesenchymal stem cell injections into any joint, there is no approval from a major regulator, and the ISSCR's guide places treatments offered outside a trial in its unproven category.

If a clinic tells you that one of the two is the obvious choice for your case, ask which trial that rests on, and ask for it in writing.

Questions to ask before you choose either

• For PRP: how is it prepared, how many times is the platelet concentration increased, and how many sessions does the quote cover?
• For stem cells: where do the cells come from, are they cultured, is the product registered with the Thai FDA, and can I see the test report for my cells with cell count and viability?
• For both: what does the published evidence say for my condition specifically, and can you send me the reference?
• For both: what is the full price in writing, and what happens, and who pays, if I have a complication after I fly home?

The five questions to ask any clinic on our home page cover the rest, and they apply to us too.