UMBILICAL CORD BLOOD BANKING: Insurance Against Future Diseases?

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), March, 2000 by Holly Wagner

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The idea behind donating to a public bank is that it increases the pool of tissue types. Donation, while free, does not guarantee the sample will be available if the donating family should need it, though. That creates a debate of ownership.

When a person donates a pint of blood to the American Red Cross, that blood goes into a public bank. With cord blood, parents have a choice whether to store their infant's sample or publicly donate it. Throughout the cord blood literature, researchers continuously ask if the blood belongs specifically to the infant or the family, or should be public property.

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Finding a bone marrow match can be difficult, especially for minorities. African-Americans, who generally have less-common tissue types, have a 59% chance of coming up with one match in the national bone marrow bank of 3,000,000 donors. Caucasians with common tissue typing have an 85% chance of finding a compatible bone marrow donor.

Public cord blood banks generally don't store a sample for a specific family. The idea here is to generate a variety of samples. "With our program, the stem cell unit likely won't help the family, but it could help somebody else," Long points out. "One reason cord bloods are so useful is because minorities are underrepresented on the National Bone Marrow Registry."

Although the number of transplants using umbilical cord stem cells has risen in the last 10 years, it's still an "experimental procedure," says Larry Lasky, associate professor of pathology and internal medicine at Ohio State University and director of the Cord Blood Program at the Ross Cord Blood Bank. "The need for cord blood cells is not like the considerable need for red blood cells. Using cord blood stem cells is just one of the many treatments for cancer. It doesn't get at the cause of cancer; it just fights the disease down."

Still, collecting a cord blood sample is a lot less painful than donating bone marrow and significantly less time-consuming than searching for a bone marrow donor match. For certain diseases, cord blood stem cells may be the therapeutic answer. It is a small price for this kind of insurance, the CBR maintains.

Because Cindy Monroe is a cancer survivor, she qualified for CBR's Designated Transplant Program. The bank collected and processed her son's blood for free and will store it for four years. After that, the Monroes will pay $95 a year for storage. If Cindy or one of her immediate family members needs the sample, it is readily available. "We would be glad to pay for it forever to keep it stored," she insists.

Some cord blood banks, such as the CBR, rely on the attending physician to collect the blood via a syringe while the placenta is still in utero and after the umbilical cord is clamped. The Ross Cord Blood Bank, however, waits for the placenta to be delivered. Tissue procurement technicians then collect the umbilical cord blood by placing the placenta on an absorbent sheet of paper that soaks up the blood covering the placenta. The cord, which hangs through a hole in the absorbent sheet, is swabbed with alcohol. The technician extracts the blood with a syringe.

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UMBILICAL CORD BLOOD BANKING: Insurance Against Future Diseases?

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), March, 2000 by Holly Wagner

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