Cord Blood Banks: A Worthwhile Investment?

March 3, 2005, — -- When she was pregnant with her first son, Tracey Dones and her husband, like many couples today, faced a tough decision: Was it worth the $500 to $1,800 fee and then annual payments up to $100 to have a private company bank blood from her child's umbilical cord?

Like bone marrow, cord blood has been shown to be effective in therapeutic transplants to treat a range of diseases, including leukemia, lymphoma and various genetic disorders. The few teaspoons of blood drawn from an umbilical cord once it has been detached also contain stem cells, which hold further promise of treating a broader range of conditions in the future -- minus the controversy now associated with embryonic stem cells.

"In the end, I said to myself, how could we not do it?" Dones said about their decision to bank Anthony's cord blood. "It could save my child's life."

But when Anthony was diagnosed with a rare genetic bone disorder at four months and needed a transplant, she learned his banked blood would not help. Those cells, her son's doctor explained, contained the same genetic defect that was causing his condition.

"That's something the company didn't tell us," she said.

Fortunately, a match from a donor in a public cord blood bank was found and today, after treatment, he is doing fine.

Dones says her story emphasizes the need to bolster cord blood supplies within the public cord blood network. Currently, only a handful of hospitals across the country are equipped to handle public cord blood donations. The option to pay to have your own child's cord blood stored for personal use, meanwhile, is not only widely available, but competitive.

Some 30 private cord blood bank companies currently have hundreds of thousands of holdings from families who, like the Doneses, pay an initial fee and then annual fees to bank blood for up to 18 years.

According to private cord blood companies, the number of parents deciding to store their children's cord blood is climbing every year. Steve Grant, vice president and co-founder of the California-based Cord Blood Registry, one of the largest private cord blood banks, reports its number of clients has doubled each year to its current holdings of 270,000 units. For the most part, these units are held exclusively for the use of the families who paid to have them stored.