Saving Cord Blood to Save Lives
by David Prentice
July 7, 2008
NPR station WCPN is running a 3-day series entitled “Life’s Blood: How umbilical cord blood is being transformed from a wasted resource into life-saving therapies“. It started today in Morning Edition.
In the first installment, “Banking on Babies: The Potential of Umbilical Cord Blood Stem Cells“, reporter Gretchen Cuda interviewed doctors and pregnant moms about banking cord blood and differences between public and private cord blood banks.
As cord blood researcher Dr. Mary Laughlin notes: “While everybody is arguing over embryonic stem cells we’re doing cord blood transplants.” Cleveland OB Dr. Marcus Tower adds “There are probably over 80 existing diseases that we’ve proven that stem cells from the umbilical cord blood to be useful in treating. ”
Tuesday’s story is supposed to follow the cord blood stem cells from the cord to the clinic. Should be interesting, so tune in.
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By: Janine Chicourrat | July 8, 2008 at 7:14 pm
So great to see this story run! A huge thank you to Cleveland for helping to lead the charge. Our company banks white blood cells for healthy individuals. When we realized the equipment we use to process and store white blood cells was the best in the market to capture cell viability and recovery rates for umbilical cord blood, we decided to add umbilical cord blood banking as an additional service in early 2009. As far as we know, we are the first US company using this type of equipment. Public Banking – Private Banking – It’s the wave of the future – in the meantime, speading the message “Just Bank” is key to young parents who are truly just beginning to learn it’s value.