Cleveland Cord Blood Center has gained accreditation from the Foundation for Accreditation of Cellular Therapy for complying with international standards for umbilical cord blood collection, processing, testing, banking, selection and release. This endorsement will allow the center to list its store of cord blood on a U.S. and international registry for use around the world. [...]

Chinese umbilical cord blood bank, China Cord Blood Corp. hopes to raise $15 million in an initial public offering, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission last week. China Cord Blood Corp. has not yet listed how many shares it is offering. It expects to be listed under the “CCBB” symbol on [...]

Cord Blood America, Inc, the umbilical cord blood stem cell preservation company focused on bringing the life saving potential of stem cells to families nationwide and internationally, announced today the participation of its subsidiary CorCell Companies, Inc., in the MyHealth Mart Value-Added Discount Program for members of Blue Cross of Northeastern Pennsylvania to access cord [...]

A successful transplant requires that the patient and the donor have matching HLA types. HLA types are inherited, half from your mother and half from your father. The probability that two siblings will have a perfect 6/6 match desired for a bone marrow transplant is 25%, whereas the probability that they will have the 4/6 [...]

It is crucial that parents who elect to donate their child’s cord blood go through an informed consent process. Federal law requires that parents sign a consent form before cord blood is collected. The consent form should reveal the possible final uses of the cord blood. There are also medical requirements for donation. In order [...]

Cord Blood America Inc. plans to open a multimillion-dollar facility in Las Vegas to store umbilical cord blood—which is rich in non-controversial adult stem cells. Jennifer Lahl, founder and national director at The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network said umbilical cord blood can be stored for years and used to treat diseases and conditions. [...]

Papers have been signed and things are moving ahead between StemCyte Inc, an American company, and Apollo Hospital Enterprises Ltd. This collaboration hopes to bring about a revolution in the treatment of over seventy different types of diseases by introducing ‘plasma depletion’ technology in India. A Memorandum of Understanding between the two companies was signed [...]

Canadian researchers at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto have found that the umbilical cord, which is usually discarded after the cord blood has been harvested for future use, in fact has the potential to become a “virtually inexhaustible” source of mesenchymal stem cells that could help researchers avoid the ethical debate surrounding embryonic stem cells. [...]

The Health Resources and Services Administering (HRSA) recently awarded a $9 million grant to the cord blood bank at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. The three-year allocate will endowment the collection, processing and storage of umbilical cord blood at M. D. Anderson to be entered in the National Cord Blood Inventory [...]

Cryobanks International India, a umbilical cord blood stem cell banking company, has set a target of collecting 20,000 samples nationally within a year, the company CEO C V Nerikar said Thursday. “Already 10,000 samples have been collected so far and another 10,000 would be collected in a year?s time” he told reporters. The company started [...]