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Cord Blood stem cell. Choose cord blood bank, you get more. The cord blood banks collect stem cells from two sources—the placenta and the umbilical cord.
The result: more stem cells. And more stem cells mean more therapeutic potential for you and your family. Blood collected from the umbilical cord and placenta after child birth contains hematopoietic stem cells that are able to differentiate into a number of specialized types of cells such as bone marrow. One problem is that little empirical evidence exists to show that stem cells extracted from a donor’s cord blood can be utilized in a therapy to the same donor. The majority of the successful transplants have involved cord blood from siblings.
Cord Blood Banks. Public cord blood banks cover the costs to collect, test and store umbilical cord blood.
Some cord blood banks may use donated blood for research instead of transplants that directly help sick patients. If this is not your wish, you must let the blood bank know because of funding limitations, it is not possible to donate cord blood at every hospital. You can check whether there are other cord blood banks in your area that accept cord blood for public donation.
Donating Cord Blood. Donated umbilical cord blood can be used to treat people with life-threatening diseases including leukemia, other types of cancer, and immune and genetic disorders. Cord blood transplantation is often an effective alternative for people in need of bone marrow transplantation who cannot find a suitable tissue-matched donor, either within their own family or from unrelated donors on bone marrow registries.
A listing of cord blood banks to which you could donate your baby's umbilical cord stem cells so that they could be used by an unrelated child in need of a stem cell transplant.
Donating cord blood is medically safe. The cord blood is collected from the umbilical cord after your baby is born.
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Donation does not change the birth process. Donating cord blood is free to you and completely confidential.
Cord blood banking generated debates about the implications of donating against private storage of umbilical blood. Umbilical cord blood, a "miracle" in medical and scientific research, is found to contain stem cells which are highly valuable in treating blood-related diseases. Its "primitiveness" can regenerate whole immune systems necessary for curing chronic diseases like leukemia, anemia, and immune system disorders. Despite its many uses, there are limited donations made in public banks because of several reasons.
The International Cord Blood Foundation is raising public awareness regarding the benefits of banking cord blood and is building an international donor bank of unrelated cord blood cells.
Registries send doctors collection kits to aid in collecting the cord blood, which then is sent to the company lab to be processed and banked. There is a high price for private storage, however, and some critics view it as exploitation of inflated cancer fears.
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