NYBC & NMDP Reach Compromise

The NY Blood Center (NYBC) and the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) have reached a compromise in the quest for a national cord blood registry: The House of Representatives passed, by a vote of 430 to 1, the bill H.R. 2520 "Stem Cell Therapeutic and Research Act of 2005". This bill is a marriage between the stalled NMDP re-authorization (HR 3034) and the NYBC proposal for a national cord blood program (HR 596). HR 2520 was passed under a suspension of rules which only occurs if there is prior agreement by interested parties. Text of HR 2520 can be read at thomas.loc.gov:

• HR 2520 allocates $79 million to compile a national inventory of 150,000 high-quality cord blood units for transplantation.
• Collected cord blood which is not suitable for transplantation will go to peer-reviewed research.
• The National Cord Blood Program is now renamed the C.W. Bill Young Cell Transplantation Program. This name is associated with the DoD branch of the NMDP
• The Dept of Health and Human Services (HHS) will contract directly with banks for bone marrow and/or cord blood services.
• The bone marrow and cord blood programs will be at the same administrative level, and may be under one contract or two.
• This effectively means that patients will have one-stop shopping for stem cell transplants.
• The cord blood contract must be competed during the first year and qualifying banks must be willing to enlist for 10 years.
• Qualifying cord blood banks must comply with section 379 of the Public Health Service Act. This was the 1998 legislation authorizing the NMDP registry. It remains to be seen if cord blood banks in the national registry will have to comply with current NMDP protocols for "participating" cord blood banks.
• There will also be a contract for collection of transplant outcomes data, like the work performed by CIBMTR.
• An advisory committee will oversee all forms of hematopoietic stem cell transplants.
• Within 6 months of the enactment of this program, the committee must define what is a "high-quality" cord blood unit.
• These compromises partly follow the recommendations of the Institute of Medicine report (see news 14 April 2005), but pushes the cord blood program into parallel with the current bone marrow program.
• At present, HHS has $19 million to start spending on cord blood collection, even though this legislation is still pending in the Senate.