Banking your baby’s cord blood is a way to save it for your baby’s future.  Some people wonder if the cord blood will be available if it is needed.  If you bank it with a private cord blood bank, it will definitely be available.  A private cord blood bank stores the cord blood for you, and you pay for the right to own it and have it whenever and if ever you should need it. Since you don’t have the equipment, supplies, and expertise required to process and store your cord blood, a cord blood bank takes care of it, but it is always your cord blood.

With a public bank, you are donating the cord blood so others can search for a match and, if yours matches, they will be able to use it.  While you no longer retain ownership of it, it is available if anyone needs it for treatment.  With a public bank, while you are unlikely to get access to your own child’s cord blood, you may investigate the possibility that someone with a match has donated their child’s cord blood.

It is a relatively new topic and it is easy to confuse private with public cord blood banks and misunderstand the difference between storing their baby’s cord blood and donating it.  Hopefully, this explains things better.  To get more information on cord blood banking, visit M.A.Z.E. Cord Blood Laboratories.

Researchers at Duke University are looking at the possibility of treating children. using cord blood, before they are born.  The scientists are exploring the treatment of metabolic diseases including Krabbe disease, metachromatic leukodystrophy (MLD), Pelizaeus-Maerzbacher Disease (PMD), Tay-Sachs disease, or Sandoff disease.

The babies will be treated, while in utero, using stem cells from banked cord blood that have been treated to accelerate and and improve the process of engraftment.  The transplant is relatively simple.  The stem cells will be injected directly into the baby’s abdomen at 12-14 weeks of pregnancy.

The babies will be tested after birth to determine if donor cells are present and if they are working to repair the malfunctioning genes.  If not, the baby may be eligible for a conventional transplant with chemotherapy during the first few weeks of life.

Read about what other diseases are currently treated by cord blood.

Breaking news last week of federal stimulus funding allocated to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center had meaningful and exciting implications for future research regarding the transfusion of cord blood stem cells to treat blood tumors such as leukemia.

The institution will receive more than $40 million across 60 research grants under the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the Stimulus package.

One grant totaling $1.74 million will be allocated to Dr. Colleen Delaney, a member of the Clinical Research Division at the Center to explore an innovative approach to increasing the number of neutrophil cells generated from a single unit of cord blood.  These cells are capable of rapid recovery from infection following cord blood transfusions, and the hope is that the new methodology will help leukemia and lymphoma patients recover from infection and therefore produce more uniformly successful results from transfusion of cord blood cells.

“Further development of this product to confirm our initial promising results requires additional clinical trials that, if successful, could change the way cord blood transplantation is performed,” Delaney said.

Read the whole article: https://www.fhcrc.org/about/ne/news/2009/10/05/stimulus.html.

I recently read an article discussing umbilical cord blood stem cell transplants used for the treatment of stroke.  Researchers at the Chi Mei Medical Center in Taiwan used mice to test the effectiveness of umbilical cord blood transplants in treating paralysis, a common, post-stroke problem.  The study discovered that the cord blood improved the animals’ condition.

This is just one of hundreds of studies that are exploring alternative uses of cord blood stem cells.  The potential opportunities with cord blood are just amazing.  We will continue to educate our readers about the various studies that are taking place using cord blood.  With cord blood’s potential, there is no way to tell what it will be used to treat in 10, 20 or even 40 years.

A colleague recently discovered an interesting blog. Natalie Curry was the first U.S. citizen to receive a cord blood stem cell transplant. Born in 1985, suffering from Fanconi Anemia, Natalie needed a stem cell transplant. Unable to fine an HLA match through bone marrow, her parents decided to conceive another child as a potential match. Natalie’s first sister was not a match, but her second sister was a perfect HLA match.

Cord blood had not been approved yet in the US for treatment of Fanconi Anemia so Natalie’s family moved to France for a stem cell transplant. After 3 months, they returned to the U.S. with her stem cell tranplant a success.

Check out Natalie’s blog to learn more about her journey. She also shares the latest news in the stem cell industry and some of her insights about the world around her.

M.A.Z.E. Cord Blood Laboratories recently sponsored a giveaway for a $500 savings bond. We have a winner! The winner is Mia Fitzgerald of Orlando, FL.

Mia is a student who entered the savings bond sweepstakes. We are thrilled that she will be able to use her savings bond when her own children need tuition for college.

Congratulations, Mia!

Scientists at the Salk Institute have been able to reprogram cord blood stem cells to make them very similar to embryonic stem cells.

Embryonic stem cells are very valuable because they can theoretically be turned into any type of cell. They are controversial because embryos must be destroyed to harvest them. Using reprogrammed adult stem cells is not ideal since many of these adult cells have undergone mutations.

That is what makes this success so significant. Cord blood stem cells are primitive cells with no mutations. If they can be reprogrammed to become any type of cell, the possibilities are endless.