Freeze Your Baby's Cord Blood for Future Stem Cell Therapies?

Saving your baby's cord blood stem cells can be lifesaving to your baby and other family members. Stem cell therapies already exist and are growing in number and sophistication. Storing your baby's own cord blood can only be done just after giving birth as otherwise the hospital will merely dispose of it. Stem cells are being used to treat conditions such as diabetes, strokes, neurological disorders, leukemias, heart conditions and many other congenital immune deficiency disorders.

So wouldn't it be a good idea to keep your baby's cord blood stem cells in a cryogenic bank as insurance for the future?

Partly true, however, aside from the marketing hype, if your child happens to have some hereditary disorder then even if a stem cell treatment is available your child's own stem cells are going to have exactly the same genetic anomaly! In those cases you would still have to use stem cells from another donor. Using one's own stem cells is useful in healing a non-genetic disorder, for example, brain damage after an accident. In such cases, having one's own cells means the body's immune system will not fight against them as if they were a foreign body. But there are also now techniques to harvest and reproduce stem cells from an adult's own blood! Admittedly, adult stem cells are not as numerous nor as long lasting as those from a placental cord, but they have been successfully used.

There are a few companies already offering to store foetal cord blood stem cells for future use. So, it is possibly still a good idea, just not as great as the hype.