You're here because you may be contemplating your options when it comes to donating your baby's cord blood to a public bank or storing it privately with a family cord blood bank. First off, kudos to you for recognizing the importance of umbilical stem cells. Medical research continues to explore potential future applications for cord blood and cord tissue.
There are several benefits that both the public and private banks provide for families in need. However, banking privately with a family cord blood bank, such as Cryo-Cell International, provides parents with greater control over access to their stored newborn stem cells should they become eligible for future medical use.
Public cord blood banks are facing unique challenges with long-term sustainability, donor diversity, and rising operational costs. In just the past five years, several U.S. public cord blood banks — including the University of Colorado's ClinImmune, the Oklahoma Blood Institute, Detroit's J.P. McCarthy Cord Stem Cell Bank, and Upstate Cord Blood Bank in Syracuse, New York — have stopped collecting donations. In 2020, the New York Blood Center's cord blood program stopped collecting new donations, but continues to distribute and maintain its large existing inventory, now under the operational banner of Comprehensive Cell Solutions. With looming problems ahead, some people question the long-term future of the public banking sector. Here's a close look at some of the challenges facing public cord blood banking today, along with what sets private banking apart.
Importance of Umbilical Stem Cells
Since the first successful umbilical cord stem cell transplant performed in 1988, there have been over 60,000 transplantations performed worldwide.15 Donor (related or unrelated*) cord blood stem cells have been used to treat nearly 80 diseases most often for blood cancers and disorders, metabolic disorders and immune disorders.12 Cord blood and cord tissue are currently being studied in clinical trials investigating potential applications for a variety of other conditions and diseases. Learn more about recent clinical trials involving cord blood and cord tissue.
Issues with Public Cord Blood Banking
Donor Variety
Because public inventories are pooled from a limited number of donors, not every patient can find a well-matched unit. And how easy that is varies significantly by ancestry. Closer donor matches are linked to better transplant outcomes, and research from the National Marrow Donor Program, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that white patients of European descent have the best odds of finding an optimal 8/8-matched adult donor, at 75%, while most other ethnic groups range between 27% and 52% — and Black patients face the steepest odds, at 16% to 19%.
Cord blood's more permissive matching threshold narrows this gap substantially. Because a cord blood unit can still be usable with one or two HLA mismatches, the same study found a suitable cord blood unit is available for more than 80% of adult patients, regardless of race or ethnicity — and when cord blood and adult-donor searches are combined, 95% of Black patients find some suitable graft, though fewer than 20% get an optimal match. Donor diversity within the public inventory still matters, since a closer match is generally linked to better outcomes, but cord blood is doing real work to close this disparity.
Collection Ineligibility
Eligibility for umbilical stem cell donation can be strict, with many donations falling short of minimum cell count, blood volume, or other donation criteria. Other factors, like the mother's health, can impact eligibility. A significant share of cord blood donations are discarded for not meeting processing and storage requirements — published estimates vary widely, from roughly 60% to over 80%, depending on the study and what's being measured. Storing cord blood and tissue for family use provides exclusive access and more freedom for potential use.
Variations in Public Banking Requirements
The AABB and the Foundation for the Accreditation of Cellular Therapy together with NetCord (NetCord-FACT) have developed international standards for cord blood banking quality management systems, and requirements that both private and public banks can choose to follow for all collected specimens. Since 2009, public cord blood banks have been required to hold an FDA biologics license application (BLA), or operate under an investigational new drug (IND) application. As of November 2024, nine public banks have completed full BLA licensure, though many others continue to operate under IND while pursuing licensure, given the time and costs involved. Other differences include:
- Disparities among public banks with factors like transit time, storage temperature, and the quality of units collected, which can result in viability issues.
- Lack of uniform quality management systems among domestic and international public banks.
- Fewer than 200 U.S. hospitals have cord blood donation programs, so parents can only donate if their baby is born at one of them — though a few mail-in programs exist. As a result, most babies born in the U.S. are born somewhere that cord blood donation isn't even an option, meaning the majority of cord blood is never collected in the first place, let alone banked.
Banking with Cryo-Cell International allows families to collect at any hospital around the world through the use of our advanced collection kit. Read more about the features of our collection kit.
Strictly Cord Blood
Cord tissue can be donated, but there's no public clinical bank for it as there is for cord blood. Public programs typically accept cord tissue under IRB-approved research protocols rather than processing and releasing it as a banked product for clinical use. That means there's no public inventory of cord tissue MSCs to draw from. Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are being explored in early-stage clinical trials for the treatment of autism, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, orthopedic conditions, and other neurological and degenerative conditions.
Resource Scarcity
Establishing an inventory of high-quality cord blood units is becoming increasingly difficult. Public collection is already limited by a small network of participating hospitals, and a large number of units that are collected end up being discarded due to low volume and/or cell counts, faulty handling of retrieved specimens, and stringent regulatory criteria.
RAND researchers reported that public banks collect an average of 8,500 units each year, but ultimately store only 5 to 40 percent of those collections. Public banks also operate on tight margins: the average fee a bank charges a transplant center for a released unit is about $36,000, and RAND's own economic modeling suggests banks would need closer to $46,000 per unit just to break even.
Private banking works differently — families pay to preserve a unit reserved exclusively for their own family, rather than contributing to a shared public inventory. It's worth understanding both paths clearly: talk with your physician or a Cryo-Cell educator about what public and private banking each actually offer.
Hybrid Banking Models
Many public banks are now adopting a hybrid model to join forces with private cord blood banks. Cryo-Cell operates a public cord blood banking program in partnership with Duke University Medical Center's Carolinas Cord Blood Bank — one of the HRSA-selected National Cord Blood Inventory contractors, alongside banks such as MD Anderson's.
Currently, cord blood and cord tissue stem cells are at the forefront of regenerative medicine research, and interest in both is likely to keep growing. Cord blood already has a strong, established track record of successful transplant outcomes, while cord tissue's regenerative potential is being studied in a number of early-stage clinical trials. As medical science continues to uncover what's possible, we hope that more parents make the informed decision to save their newborn's umbilical stem cells — and take it one step further by banking privately with Cryo-Cell.
The future of public cord blood banking will continue to be called into question, and we may see more of a shift toward hybrid models. That shift reflects what Cryo-Cell has long focused on: giving families more options. We remain committed to leading the private cord blood banking industry.
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