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The stem cells in this vital fluid could save someone’s life, but it probably won’t be your child’s.
By Dana Najjar
To bank or not to bank — that is the question I found myself reckoning with around six months into my pregnancy, when advertisem*nts for private cord blood banks seemed to be popping up everywhere. “Protect what matters most,” a poster in my obstetrician’s office said. “Build your family a healthy future,” an ad on my Instagram feed prompted.
At the time, I had no idea what cord blood was, or why I’d want to pay some company hundreds of dollars per year to hold onto it. But didn’t I want to protect my family? I was forced to pay attention.
Cord blood, I learned, is the stem-cell-rich blood that flows through the umbilical cord and the placenta when your baby is in the womb. When providers cut and clamp the umbilical cord after delivery, they can collect the remaining blood and send it to a bank where it’s plunged into a deep freeze. But while the Food and Drug Administration has approved cord blood from a donor to treat a variety of blood and immune system disorders like leukemia, lymphoma and sickle cell disease, some private cord blood companies are advertising this valuable fluid as a blanket biological insurance policy against a host of other conditions, including autism, cerebral palsy, Alzheimer’s and more.
The only problem: It’s not approved to treat any of these ailments.
“These are really cool cells and they have a lot of potential properties,” said Paul Knoepfler, a stem cell biologist at the University of California, Davis. But before positioning them as a treatment for anything beyond blood diseases, researchers need to prove that they are safe and effective. “And that hasn’t been done,” he said.
Why cord blood is so special
Swirling around cord blood are millions of special kinds of blood stem cells known as hematopoietic stem cells, which can develop into any type of blood cell in the human body. On a given day, the stem cells in your bone marrow make billions of new red and white blood cells to replenish old ones that have died. But if they make mistakes, the result can be serious, even fatal. Leukemia, for instance, results when the body produces too many abnormal white blood cells, which can crowd out healthy ones.
Before the 1980s, the only way to get a blood stem cell transplant for a disease like leukemia was to use bone marrow from a donor. But that can be a long and challenging process (bone marrow is not collected until you find a perfect match) and can come with serious risks for the recipient (and sometimes for the donor). Cord blood transplants, which come from your own cord blood or a donor’s and which are administered similar to a blood transfusion, proved to be faster (cord blood has already been collected and can be administered right away), less risky and in many cases, just as useful. They also became a boon for people of color, since bone marrow registries in the United States tend not to be racially and ethnically diverse, and cord blood doesn’t require as exact a match as bone marrow.
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