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Stem Cell News and Research

Access limits promising stem-cell therapy

Among the many decisions that parents face before the birth of their child is a potentially critical one: whether to preserve their infant's umbilical-cord blood on the chance that he or she will need it someday to treat a serious illness.

Parents can pay thousands of dollars to privately store their newborn's umbilical-cord blood or they can donate the blood to a public bank for free. Nine out of 10 new parents do neither, which means their children's umbilical cords are discarded as medical waste.

That discard rate is posing a threat to the expansion of a promising new health-care field. Umbilical-cord blood is rife with stem cells, which can be used to treat dozens of illnesses such as leukemia, diabetes, lymphoma and stroke. But the lack of publicly banked samples makes it harder for patients to obtain a stem-cell match for use in therapy.

The Arizona Republic, August 2009
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