‘If a child contracts a blood disease, then his own blood cannot cure it. He or she will need cord blood of another person with a perfect match.’
Doctors in India are on the forefront in establishing public banks of “umbilical cord blood” instead of preserving them for private use. Since the blood cells of an umbilical cord of a child cannot be used for the donor child, doctors have initiated the process of creating a pool of umbilical cord blood which can be used by any other person who needs it.
Lalit Jaiswal, Director of CelluGen Biotech and pioneer of pool banking of stem cells in India said, “People have long been misled into thinking that if they preserve the cord blood of their child, then this blood will be able to cure blood disorders that child or a sibling who might have the misfortune to contract such a disease. However, most of the blood disorders are genetic in nature. If a child contracts a blood disease, then his own blood cannot cure it. He or she will need cord blood of another person with the perfect match to be able to use it for therapy. Therefore, preservation for self use is pointless and a waste of money. Instead, a public pool of cord blood will help people find the perfect match.”
According to doctors, the reality of cord blood being of no use to the donor has always been known, but lack of awareness and emotional attachment with preservation of umbilical cords helped the industry of private preservation.
When it comes to availability of public cord blood banks, India, with less than 5,000 units stored, cuts a sorry figure in finding a compatible match. Even the 600,000 cord blood units stored in public banks worldwide are of little use to Indian patients due to ethnicity.
Dr Rahul Bhargava, Director, Haematology and Bone Marrow Transplant, at Fortis Memorial Research Institute, Gurgaon, said, “Another major issue is that umbilical cords that have been preserved do not have human leukocyte antigen (HLA) typing (HLA is done to match genetically similar individuals in the hope of performing a tissue transplantation). It is like having a blood bank, but without categorising the blood into various blood groups, which is why there is a need of heavy investment to convert private banks into a public pool with HLA typing and cord blood cells preserved in a manner that they can be used again.”
To fill this huge gap in the treatment of blood-related disorders, stakeholders are looking for viable solutions. An example is Mycord, the first Private Umbilical Cord Pool Bank not only in the country, but the world.
“With growing awareness around cord blood transplant, all we need to do is to help parents make informed choices by offering them better options. Mycord aims to break the current practice of private cord blood banks that allow access to only own cord blood, which in most cases, is of no therapeutic use,” Jaiswal added.
Private Umbilical Cord Blood banking was introduced in America in the 1990s and in India a decade later. This is after the first successful cord blood transplant in France in1988 which paved the way for cord blood as an alternative source to bone marrow derived stem cells—both of which are an approved norm of stem cell treatment for a host of blood-related disorders.