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Cord Blood For A Rainy Day
By Lauren Young
Edited by Dan Beucke
BusinessWeek
20 June 2005
The science of stem cells is confusing enough. But for some parents, it's also expensive. Worried their newborn might miss out on medical breakthroughs, parents are rushing to store blood from the umbilical cord. At Cord Blood Registry, the largest private storage bank, enrollments rose 120% in May over a year earlier. The San Bruno (Calif.) outfit has 300,000 samples frozen at a storage facility in Tucson. It charges $1,975 to store blood, plus an annual $125 maintenance fee. "Like home insurance and car insurance, this is just-in-case insurance," says Stephen Grant, the bank's co-founder.
But the American Academy of Pediatrics says private storage is "unwise" unless families have a history of diseases such as sickle cell anemia. (In those cases, Cord Blood Registry will store it for free.) Usually donors and recipients need only have the same racial or ethnic heritage. "The chances that your own child will need to use banked cord blood are extremely low," says Dr. Maria Escolar, a stem cell researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A better idea, she says: donate to one of 22 public banks for use in transplants and research.
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