Banking on cord blood

Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Rebecca Haynes, Staff Writer

Banking on cord blood photo of cord blood banking procedure

Megan Harrington, a cryobiologist at LifeLine Cryogenics, processes umbilical cord blood, separating out the stem cells and eventually putting them into liquid nitrogen for freezing and storage in Stamford, Conn. on Wednesday, Sept. 2, 2009. In this step, she prepares a sample to be placed in the centrifuge.

For the Deenihan family of Stamford, banking their daughter Matilda's umbilical cord blood was a no-brainer.

"Obviously it's a very personal choice, but for us, it's just a safety net and if it helps one of our family members in the future then we're lucky," said Danielle Deenihan. She and her husband, Greg Deenihan, had wanted to bank cord blood when their first daughter, Kaylee, was born two years ago in Australia, Danielle Deenihan's native country. The cost, however, was prohibitive, she said. So when Matilda was born in Fairfield County last year, they were eager to bank the blood.

"When Kaylee was born, I actually saw my husband cut the umbilical cord and I saw the blood drip out and I had a tear in my eye because we couldn't save it at that time," Deenihan said.banking on cord blood equipment

A newborn's cord blood is rich in stem cells, the body's building blocks, which can be used to treat a variety of diseases. And although the Deenihans have no known genetic medical issues to safeguard against, they wanted to save the cells -- just in case. "We just know it's there and that it's available," Danielle Deenihansays of Matilda's cord blood. "And they can only do better with genetics and you just don't know what's going to be coming in the future."

In an embryo, stem cells are blank slates waiting for direction on what type of cells to become. But what makes placenta and umbilical cord blood stem cells unique, says Marion Welch, medical coordinator at Stamford's cord blood bank, LifeLine Cryogenics, is that despite the fact that they are blood cells, they're still young enough and immature enough that they can be reprogrammed by the body and used to repair other types of cells

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