East Alabama Medical Center

About

Established in 1997 in Gainesville, Fla., LifeCord was the first public cord bank established in the Southeastern United States. LifeCord has collected more than 19,000 cord blood units and banked 3,938 of them since its inception.  LifeCord is a program of LifeSouth Community Blood Centers, developed in cooperation with the University of Florida College of Medicine and the Shands at UF Stem Cell Laboratory.  LifeCord belongs to the cohort of banks funded by HRSA to collect racially diverse donations for the national cord blood inventory.

The medical director of LifeCord is John R. Wingard, M.D., director of the stem cell transplant program at Shands.  LifeCord uses the state of the art, fully automated Sepax processing system from Biosafe.  The Sepax processing kit is a sterile, single-use, functionally closed system, so that the cord blood never comes into contact with the external environment.

As of Dec. 2011, collections are accepted from:

1. North Florida Regional Medical Center, Gainesville FL
   
2. Shands Teaching Hospital at University of Florida, Gainesville FL
3. Baptist East Hospital in Montgomery, Alabama
4. Baptist South Hospital in Montgomery, Alabama
5. Jackson Hospital in Montgomery, Alabama
6. East Alabama Medical Center, Opelika, Alabama
7. Northeast Georgia Medical Center, Gainesville, GA