Umbilical cord blood donation program expanding

Mothers of newborns are being offered the option of donating the blood from the umbilical cords of their healthy babies to hospital blood banks, rather than having it discarded as medical waste.

University Health Care is expanding its umbilical cord blood program to give more Utah mothers the option of donating, in a new partnership with St. Mark's Hospital.

Umbilical cord blood is rich in adult stem cells, similar to bone marrow, and is used to treat diseases such as leukemia, lymphoma, metabolic storage disease and aplastic anemia.

"Umbilical cord blood is something readily available that is normally discarded as hospital waste, yet it can save lives. In Utah we're in a unique position because of our high birth rate to make a significant contribution to the national inventory," said Linda Kelley, director of the Cell Therapy Facility and professor of internal medicine at the University of Utah School of Medicine.

Unlike bone marrow, cord blood poses less risk for transplant rejection, is more readily available, and tissue matching is less stringent. Approximately 10,000 cord blood transplants have been performed worldwide.

Officials said St. Mark's has been collecting cord blood, with 327 units collected since August. When asked to participate in the program, "the answer was an immediate yes," said Marilyn Love, director of Labor and Delivery at St. Mark's Hospital. "As a life comes into this world, another life can also be saved. This is an amazing program, and we are proud to support it."

Mothers are told when admitted about the program and may choose to participate. Both mother and baby must be healthy, the baby must be a minimum of 36 weeks gestation and the delivery must be non-problematic in order to donate. A phlebotomist collects the blood from the discarded umbilical cord and placenta, and it is sent to a public bank to be tested, processed and logged into a national database. University Health Care partners with StemCyte International Cord Blood Bank located in Arcadia, Calif., one of nine banks nationwide.

There is no cost to the hospitals or the families to participate. About 60 percent of the cord blood units collected through University Health Care are eligible for public banking. Blood ineligible for the national inventory is added to the U.'s stem cell repository to aid research for expanding stem cells and evaluating the cells' responses to therapeutic drugs.