Save, Store, Donate: Reasons Parents Should Consider Cord Blood Banking

Save, Store, Donate: Reasons Parents Should Consider Cord Blood Banking

When you go to the bank, you deposit money, right? Well, some “banks,” which are actually advanced scientific labs, will “bank” blood – umbilical cord blood. Women deposit their umbilical cord blood immediately after birth, and it’s available for use for any family member. Wow! Does that sound strange? To some, hiring a company to look over their stem cell-filled cord blood for the rest of their life is perfectly normal. More than that, it could be life-saving.

How It’s Done
When your baby is born, cord blood is collected from the umbilical cord. Only three to five ounces is collected from each cord. The amount is small enough to treat an ill child, but not enough to treat an adult. Still, multiple units of matched cord blood may be able to treat an adult.

Why It’s Done
Cord blood is collected so that, later on in life, blood diseases can be treated using the stem cells in the blood. Babies who need stem cell transplants can receive their own stem cells in a very usable format. For example, if a patient needs stem cells for cancer therapy or some other illness, rather than collecting it from bone marrow, the cord blood can be used.

The disadvantage with using bone marrow, or regular blood transfusions, is that it’s harder to find a match exactly when a patient needs it. On the other hand, having banked cord blood makes finding a donor easy – the cord blood is a perfect match and can be used on-demand.

Patients using cord blood also recover more quickly when they receive stem cell transplants. There are also some therapies on the horizon that use patient stem cells to help accelerate healing processes in a variety of conditions.

Planning Ahead
According to companies like StemCyte™, who do cord blood banking, you need to notify your bank of choice at least 4 to 6 weeks before your due date. This is so that preparations can be made for your cord blood. If you don’t notify them on time, you won’t be able to bank the blood.

You can choose to either bank the blood with a private company or a public one.

Private Vs Public Banks
Private companies charge a fee for their services, but they preserve the cord blood for you, specifically. If you, or anyone in your family, ever needs the stem cells, you are guaranteed them in the future.

Public companies do not guarantee your blood. It may be used for you, other people, or for research. This is an options you may or may not want to choose, depending on what you think you will need.

Public companies are free, which is why some people choose to donate to them. Of course, if you’re going through the trouble of donating, you might well want to pay for the benefit of having access to the blood.

You Can’t Cure Any Disease
While stem cells are capable of becoming any cell in the body, and therefore are instrumental in the treatment of a variety of diseases, they cannot cure everything, and there are therapies that are not yet approved by the FDA.

For example, you can use the cord blood if you have a family history of disease that harms the blood and immune system later on in life. For example, families with a strong history of leukemia and some cancers like sickle-cell anemia, use banked blood as a treatment.

But, not all moms can donate their cord blood. So, if you are younger than 18, have already been treated for cancer, of have received chemotherapy, you’ve had malaria in the last three years, or have been treated for a blood disease like hepatitis or HIV/AIDS, then you cannot use your blood cord. Finally, if you’re delivering the baby prematurely, you cannot collect the cord blood and donate it – you can collect it for private use, however.

Where To Bank Your Cord Blood
There are many places all over the world that will do this for you. Here is a list by country. There are also places where you can donate your cord blood to others for use, and where there is no guarantee that it will be available to you for future use.

To donate the cord blood, you must sign up between the 28th and 34th week of pregnancy. This is essential, and if you do not do it during this time, you can be turned down. If you are donating to a private bank, you will talk with your doctor as soon as you can about the procedure, and the blood is collected when you give birth.

Dr. Wise Young is one of the world’s most outstanding neuroscientists and a foremost leader in spinal cord injury research. He enjoys sharing his research and ideas online through blogging.

Vast Majority of Life-Saving Cord Blood Sits Unused

Vast Majority of Life-Saving Cord Blood Sits Unused
High costs keep patients from using stem cells harvested from umbilical cords
December 5, 2014 |By Lydia Chain and Scienceline
studying ways to treat HIV, cerebral palsy and other diseases using umbilical cord blood


Scientists are studying ways to treat HIV, cerebral palsy and other diseases using umbilical cord blood, although little of the collected blood will actually be used.
Credit: Banc de Sang via flickr
You’d think doctors and patients would be clamoring for cells so versatile they could help reboot a body suffering from everything from leukemia to diabetes. But a new report shows that an important source of these stem cells—discarded umbilical cords—is rarely used because of high costs and the risk of failure.

Stem cells drawn from newborns’ umbilical cord blood are sometimes used to treat medical conditions, especially bone and blood cancers like multiple myeloma or lymphoma by replacing dysfunctional blood-producing cells in bone marrow. Generally the diseased cells are destroyed with chemotherapy and irradiation. Then new stem cells are transplanted into the patient to restore function. Cord blood stem cells are an alternative to bone marrow transplants and peripheral blood transplants, in which stem cells are gathered from the blood stream. Cord blood tends to integrate better with the body and it is easier to find a suitable donor than the alternatives.

Yet less than 3 percent of cord blood collected in the U.S. is ever used whereas the rest sits uselessly in blood banks, according to a recent report in Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News. Immunologist Enal Razvi is author of the report and managing director of Select Biosciences, a biotechnology consulting agency. Razvi found that public cord blood banks, which store donated frozen units for transplants as needed, have only a 1 to 3 percent turnover annually. Most of their inventory sits unused year after year. For example, at Community Blood Services in New Jersey, patients have only used 278 of its 13,000 cords since it opened in 1996, according to business development director Misty Marchioni. Usage is even lower at private cord blood banks, which charge clients thousands of dollars to store a cord in the event a family member one day needs it.

Unlike bone marrow, the main alternative stem cell source, cells transplanted from cord blood carry little risk of graft-versus-host disease, a deadly condition in which the body rejects a transplant. Scientists believe this is because a baby’s immune system is closer to a blank slate, so their stem cells can integrate with the patient’s body more easily. But cord blood transplants also take longer to start working, requiring longer hospital stays and upping the bill. Due to storage and testing costs, the cords themselves also get pricy. “The cost of the cord is prohibitively high,” Razvi explains. Each unit of cord blood costs between $35,000 and $40,000 and most adults require two units for a successful transplant. Insurance companies will generally pay a set amount for a stem cell transplant regardless of where the cells come from. The price tag on a cord blood transplant can run up to $300,000, which may not be fully covered.

Cord blood stem cell transplants also have a higher failure rate than other transplant methods. If the transplant fails, it leaves patients with a compromised immune system in addition to their original disease and medical bills. Because the preparation for transplant includes wiping out the patient’s original bone marrow, the entire body has to be repopulated with stem cells able to replace it. There are not many stem cells in each cord. Compared with bone marrow or peripheral blood there is a greater chance that there will not be enough stem cells that actually implant and begin producing blood and bone marrow. “It’s like spreading a small amount of seeds in a big garden,” says Mitchell Horwitz, who teaches cell therapy at Duke University Medical Center. “Sometimes it just doesn’t take.”

Martin Smithmyer, chief executive of the private bank Americord, claims that more clients will eventually use their cords, especially as more applications are found for cord blood stem cells. But some scientists disagree. Steven Joffe, a professor of medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, says that many treatments cannot be done with a patient’s own stem cells because genetic diseases would already be present in the cord blood and that bone marrow might be a better option for relatives. “The likelihood they are ever going to use that product is vanishingly small,” he says.

Despite the low usage, advocates say cord blood programs have been crucial in improving transplant options for racial minorities, because it can be hard to find a bone marrow match for some groups. Cord blood does not need to match the patient as perfectly as bone marrow. “This has transformed the treatment of minority patients,” says Andromachi Scaradavou, medical director of the National Cord Blood Program, a public bank based in New York City. “In the past we didn’t have good donors to offer them.” Community Blood Services’s Marchioni also maintains that cord blood is a good emergency option, because finding a compatible bone marrow or peripheral blood donor can take months or years. “If you need a transplant quickly,” she says, “it’s easy to get cord blood off of a shelf.”

Still, experts are working on more efficient ways of ensuring widespread availability of cord blood without having so much of it sit forever unused. Researchers are also continuing to look for ways to improve transplant success and to increase the number of stem cells obtained from each cord, potentially bringing down costs and making cord blood transplants feasible for more patients. “If the cost could be lowered,” Scaradavou says, “it would help a lot of patients get the treatment they need.”

Valuable Cord Blood Sits Unused

Valuable Cord Blood Sits Unused
High costs are keeping patients from using stem cells harvested from umbilical cords.

WIKIMEDIA, MAGNUS MANSKE
You’d think doctors and patients would be clamoring for cells so versatile they could help reboot a body suffering from everything from leukemia to diabetes. But a new report shows that an important source of these stem cells—discarded umbilical cords—is rarely utilized because of high costs and the risk of failure.

Stem cells drawn from the umbilical cord blood of newborn babies are sometimes used to treat medical conditions like lymphoma and sickle-cell anemia by replacing dysfunctional blood-producing cells in bone marrow. Yet less than 3 percent of cord blood collected in the United States is ever used, while the rest sit uselessly in blood banks, according to a September Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News report.

“The cost of the cord is prohibitively high,” explained immunologist Enal Razvi, author of the report and director of Select Biosciences, a biotechnology consulting agency. Each unit of cord blood costs between $35,000 and $40,000, and most adults require two units for a successful transplant.

Unlike bone marrow, the main alternative stem cell source, cells transplanted from cord blood carry little risk of graft-versus-host disease, a deadly condition in which the body rejects a transplant. Scientists believe this is because a baby’s immune system is closer to a blank slate, so their stem cells can integrate with the patient’s body more easily. But cord blood transplants also take longer to start working, requiring longer hospital stays and upping the bill. Insurance companies will generally pay a set amount for a stem cell transplant regardless of where the cells come from. The price tag on a cord blood transplant can run up to $300,000, which may not be fully covered.

There is also a risk that a transplant could fail entirely, leaving patients with a compromised immune system in addition to their original disease and medical bills.

“It’s like spreading a small amount of seeds in a big garden,” said Mitchell Horwitz, who teaches cell therapy at Duke University Medical Center. “Sometimes it just doesn’t take.”

These complications help explain the low usage of cord blood in the United States. Razvi found that public cord blood banks, which store donated frozen units for transplants as needed, have only a 1 percent to 3 percent turnover annually. Most of their inventory sits unused year after year. For example, at Community Blood Services in New Jersey, patients have only used 278 of its 13,000 cords since it opened in 1996, according to business development director Misty Marchioni.