News

Nov 2024   The UAE has a half dozen new cord blood laboratories, four of them from companies that have been in this market for years and two from new entities. The explosion of laboratories in this small country is partly an effort to continue doing business under new regulations, and partly an investment in a national market that many see as having great potential.

Nov 2024   Swiss Stem Cells Biotech has introduced a banking model that is a private/public hybrid with crossover. Parents that opt into the hybrid bank have the option to release their cord blood if it matches an anonymous patient.

Nov 2024   Parent’s Guide to Cord Blood has been offering parents questionnaires to ask family banks since 1998. Back in 2017 we moved these questions into the FAQ section of our website. Now in 2024 we are restoring the format where all the questions are in one list.

Oct 2024   China is performing more cord blood therapies per year than the rest of the world combined. Haplo-Cord transplants are popular in China and are called "double insurance" transplants. China is compared to India, another Asian country with thousands of patients in need of stem cell transplants for Thalassemia. India has the potential to be a world leader in cord blood transplants if this therapy option was more accessible to patients in need.

Oct 2024   Today's cord blood transplants have roughly the same engraftment time and graft failure rate as haplo transplants.

Sep 2024   Registrations of clinical trials performing advanced cell therapy with perinatal cells have returned to pre-pandemic levels. When perinatal blood is used in trials to treat hematology/oncology disorders, it is usually as a source material to derive immunotherapy cells. Trials of perinatal MSC continue to be spread among many indications for use.

Sep 2024   Cryo-Cell has launched operations in a 56,000 sq ft building located near Duke University Medical Center. Going forward, Cryo-Cell will split their activities between Oldsmar, Florida, and Durham, North Carolina. The state-of-the-art storage facility in Durham now offers third party storage under the name ExtraVault. When completed, the Durham facility will also offer cellular manufacturing and clinical services.

Aug 2024   Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) is gradually replacing targeted genetic testing in medical research, public health programs, and direct to consumer health tests. In this article we explain why WGS is both the most accurate form of screening and can also be the most economical method of screening. Over 7,000 genetic disorders have been identified to date, many of them for rare diseases that are otherwise hard to diagnose. When parents request genomic screening for their child, they can learn about health risks that manifest in childhood, whereas adults can learn about any health risk if they so choose.

Aug 2024   A recent NYT article about cord blood banking contained very misleading statements and we have responded with corrections. Topics covered include: the percentage of cord blood units (CBU) that are contaminated, the reasons privately banked CBU are rejected from clinical trials, the odds of using cord blood for a transplant versus for clinical trial, the number of children that have been treated with privately banked cord blood, and more.

Jul 2024   The purpose of this article is to explain that, under standard operating procedures, cord blood banks normally have multiple overlapping levels of safeguards in effect to protect the samples in their storage tanks.