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Private Blood Bank Here Stores Stem Cells For Future Use
By Sheryl Kornman
The Tucson Citizen
06 December 2005
A private blood bank that stores newborn umbilical cord blood stem cells in cryogenic vaults for future medical use showed them off yesterday.
The grand opening of the Cord Blood Registry was on the site of a former semiconductor plant near Tucson International Airport.
Tom Moore, the company's CEO, said it began as a technology transfer project in 1995 with David Harris, a University of Arizona professor of microbiology and immunology. Harris is the scientific director of the company. When Harris banked his own newborn's blood in 1992 at UA, it became the world's first banked cord blood sample.
Moore said UA was chosen because it "had the best technology in the world at that time" to develop a private umbilical cord blood stem cell facility. The facility, which Moore said follows the federal Food and Drug Administration's "good tissue practices," became in 1998 the first of its kind accredited by the American Association of Blood Banks.
Today, the lab here can process up to 4,300 samples a day.
The use of umbilical cord blood stem cells is "not controversial," Moore said, "because no embryonic stem cells" are used. "These cells already know what to do. They've differentiated."
Embryonic stem cells, however, must be grown into special types of cells.
The Cord Blood Registry's 80,000-square-foot plant in the Bay Colony Technology Center here dwarfs its previous Tucson facility, a 6,500-square-foot site near Tucson Boulevard and Broadway.
For an initial fee of about $1,800 and an annual fee of $125, the company tests and stores blood stem cells collected from a newborn's umbilical cord for future medical use by the infant's family - "anyone genetically related," Moore said.
Drs. Zoreh Kazemi-Dunn and Paige Brainard, Tucson obstetricians at Copperstate Ob/Gyn Associates, said they've stored the umbilical cord blood of their children at CBR. As UA College of Medicine residents, they worked with Harris in his studies of cord blood.
Brainard's twins are adopted. Storing their umbilical cord blood is a form of insurance, she said.
"It's expensive. You don't know if you'll ever need it, but it's there if you do," she said. "If you don't do it, you can't go back."
Umbilical cord blood was once considered waste but now is an alternative to bone marrow cells in treating some diseases, such as leukemia.
Umbilical cord blood contains "stem cells" that can be transplanted to a patient to help form a new immune system to treat some cancers and liver disease and heal brain injury caused by oxygen deprivation, according to a CBR news release.
Newborn stem cell transplants have been used worldwide in 6,000 transplants to treat about 80 diseases, according to Rita Kennen, a CBR spokeswoman.
Studies are under way to use newborn stem cells to treat diabetes, heart disease, cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy and other diseases.
Brainard said she and Kazemi-Dunn talk about the value of cord blood banking in their practices here if patients ask, and they stock the CBR collection kits in their offices.
The doctors themselves harvest the blood from the baby's umbilical cord just after birth, using the CBR kits. They provide a syringe or "bag" method that allows the blood to drain from the cord into a sterile bag.
The collection kits are picked up at the hospital or other birth site in Tucson by a courier service and driven to a lab near Phoenix for testing.
Mandatory testing for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, is required. Only blood samples with HIV cannot be stored at CBR, said CBR's Tucson lab manager, Beth Mapother.
After testing, the red blood cells are frozen in test tubes, using liquid nitrogen, and stored at the Tucson site at minus 384 degrees.
The company is storing more than 400,000 units of stems cells from more than 110,000 clients.
The company has its administrative offices in San Bruno, Calif.
To learn more
For more information on umbilical cord banks: Cord Blood Registry, 1 (888) CORD BLOOD and www.cordblood.com and American Pregnancy Association, 1 (800) 672-2296 and http://www.americanpregnancy.org
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