You are an expecting parent thinking about cord blood banking? You are wondering about the differences between public and private cord blood banking?
Cord Blood Awareness Month
Decoding Cord Blood Banking: Your Guide to Making the Right Choice
If you are an expecting parent, you might have heard or read about public and private cord blood banking. You may have become aware of the healing and regenerative power of umbilical cord blood stem cells. Are you faced with the major question of whether to save the cord blood at birth of your baby?
We appreciate #CordBloodAwarenessMonth as an opportunity to give you with independent information on the benefits and “how-tos.”
What is umbilical cord blood and what are blood stem cells?
Umbilical cord blood is the blood that remains after the placenta is expelled during birth. While cord blood was discarded for decades, clinicians and scientists eventually recognized its usefulness as a source of blood (“haematopoeitic”) stem cells. Blood stem cells can differentiate and develop into specialized blood cells. Adults have these blood stem cells in their bone marrow. Stem cells can be isolated and transplanted. Given through the bloodstream, they travel to the bone marrow, settle, and start generating new blood cells.
Why preserving cord blood?
Numerous serious and complex disorders are remedied by stem-cell transplantations. It is why stem-cell transplantation is deemed a gift of life. Cord blood stem cells are biologically younger and are more flexible compared to adult stem cells from other sources like bone marrow. Therefore, there is less risk of complications when used in transplants.
For parents who have a history of cancer, blood or immune system disorders in the family, the answer to “Why?” might seem easy. Stem cell therapy is already well established to treat serious medical conditions including
- many forms of leukemia
- non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma
- neuroblastoma
- blood disorders such as Fanconi anemia, sickle cell anemia, and thalassemia
- inherited metabolic ailments with severe brain damage such as leukodystrophies or mucopolysaccharidoses
- immune deficiency disorders
are among the roughly 80 diseases for which stem cell therapies are standard.
What is Allogenic or Autologous Stem Cell Treatment?
Many parents think about preserving cord blood stem cells as a kind of life insurance for their future child. However, it is important to understand the two modes of stem cell treatment — and which one is beneficial in what kind of medical condition.
-> Allogeneic — the patient receives stem cells from a matching donor, either a sibling or an unrelated donor
-> Autologous — the patient receives their own stem cells
Most of the established standard stem cell treatments use an allogenic approach: For example, if a child develops an acute leukemia, a Fanconi anemia, or a thalassemia to name three of the most frequent ailments, the cause of the disease is or maybe already inherited in the stem cells of the child. Therefore, treatment of these children with their own (autologous) stem cells usually is not an option. Instead, these diseased children need a healthy stem cell (allogenic) donor with very similar tissue characteristics. Family members have a higher chance to match — but unfortunately very often don’t match good enough for a stem cell transplantation.
The non-profit organization Parent’s Guide to Cord Blood Foundation is listing disorders, that are treated by stem cells and indicate, whether the treatment is allogenic or autologous. You will notice that only very few ailments currently can be treated by the child’s own cord blood cells.
Parent’s Guide to Cord Blood Foundation
https://parentsguidecordblood.org/en/diseases
Private or Public? For Family Only or For All?
You may have heard there are different options to save cord blood from your baby. But what is the exact difference between public and private cord blood banks? What kind to choose?
Donating Cord Blood in a Public Bank
Public cord blood banks accept cord blood donations from healthy pregnancies and use them to save the life of patients needing a cord blood transplant. To donate a cord blood sample, you will need to find a hospital that accepts donations or a public bank to assist you on the process. One current possibility in the UAE is the governmental hybrid Dubai Cord Blood & Research Center, where you can opt for a public donation. The Abu Dhabi Biobank is an initiative between the Department of Health, Abu Dhabi and M42, which combines cord blood banking along with a broader “pan human” biofluid and tissue collection. This upcoming biobank is expected to create a highly valuable resource that can be used for medical treatments and biomedical research, both in the UAE and globally.
Donating your baby’s cord blood sample in a public bank is free of fees for you. But you need to know, that once it is collected, you will hand over the ownership to the public bank and have no access to the stem cells donated. Strongly controlled and regulated by the health authorities, the stem cells will be offered and transplanted to another child or adult suffering from life-threatening disorders who matches best to the stem cells of you baby. Many patients are seeking this perfect match. Your generous donation may rescue their life.
If your family is healthy and you are awaiting a healthy child, donating cord blood in a public bank is your gift to other humans.
Private Cord Blood Banking
Saving the cord blood with a private bank, also known as private cord blood banking, allows you to preserve your newborn baby’s cord blood sample in a company-owned cord blood bank. It will only be for your baby and your family’s exclusive use.
One advantage of storing the cord blood privately is that if one of your family members requires a cord blood transplant in the future, the sample is available immediately for treatment. This may be important when your family has a history for an inherited disease that is treatable by allogenic stem cell transplantation. A brother or sister of your healthy donating child might get ill with such an disease. There is a 25% chance of a perfect match between siblings allowing a promising transplantation.
In addition, private cord blood banks are stressing the potential upcoming medical treatments based on umbilical cord blood stem cells. If some of the ongoing experimental research and clinical trials come to fruition, your child’s cord blood stem cells may be useful also to itself.
What you need to know:
1. Saving cord blood stem cells in a private bank is not free of charge. Offered prices in the UAE are around 20.000 AED for a 20–30-year storage. The Dubai Cord Blood & Research Center is a governmental hybrid Public and Private cord blood bank. Private storage offers packages already starting from around 9.000 AED.
2. If no diseases will arise in your family which is treatable by stem cells, the blood cord cells will never be used in the usual 20–30 years of storage. Your child´s stem cells will not be offered to other patients seeking for an allogenic donor.
How is the baby’s cord blood collected?
Cord blood is collected by your obstetrician–gynecologist or the staff at the hospital where you give birth. After the baby is born, the umbilical cord is cut and clamped. Blood is drawn from the cord with a sterile needle that has a bag attached. The process takes about 10 minutes. It gives no pain or harm for neither the mother nor the baby.
More information for your decision?
Read Shai´s Story.
You may read Shai’s Story (parentsguidecordblood.org). Shai was a little girl whose mother used her scientific background to search for the best approach to cure her cancer. Shai narrowly escaped death many times, including a recovery that even her doctors considered a miracle, yet she died at dawn on the day that she would have begun kindergarten. Her mother went on to found the Parent´s Guide to Cord Blood website and charity in Shai´s memory.
Health matters. Consider donation. #CordBloodAwarenessMonth
TheKnowHow — Your Health, Your Voice
https://theknowhow.ae/blog/
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