More about collecting and storing umbilical cord blood stem cells

The independent articles identified below are written by doctors, scientists and other people outside Virgin Health Bank. Whilst we can answer your questions about Virgin Health Bank, we’re not able to comment on work done or things written by other people. These references don’t necessarily represent our views at Virgin Health Bank – they’re intended to help you understand stem cell storage. Thousands of other references exist that aren’t included here, and our comments on each reference are just to give you some useful pointers, they are not complete summaries of each article.

High-efficiency recovery of functional haematopoietic progenitor and stem cells from human cord blood cryopreserved for 15 years
Broxmeyer HE
Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA 2003 Jan 21; 100(2): 645–50

This reference provides evidence for successful storage of cord blood stem cells for 15 years before being used for transplantation. There is good evidence that cord blood stem cells can be stored for much longer than this and still be effective when transplanted. However, because cord blood storage has only been around since the 1980s there is very little information on how long units that have been used for transplantation had been stored for.

In utero or ex utero cord blood collection: which is better?
Lasky LC, Lane, Thomas A; Miller, John P; Haley, N Rebecca; Lindgren, Bruce; Patterson, Heidi A; Ballen, Karen
Transfusion. 2002 Oct;42(10):1261–7

This paper looked at whether there was a difference between collecting umbilical cord blood ‘in-utero’ (before the placenta has left the mother’s body) or ‘ex-utero’ (after the placenta has left the mother’s body). It describes ‘pros and ‘cons to both methods.