State finds funds for cord-blood banks

Three years after the Knesset passed the Cord-Blood Bank Law, the Health Ministry is allocating money to actually carry it out. Its ultimate aim is to make cord blood, derived from umbilical cords and placentas, available to all.

The Health Ministry yesterday announced a NIS 3 million budget earmarked for increasing the pool of umbilical-cord blood in Israel, starting from this July. The target is to increase the pool of cord blood by 1,000 units a year.

Boaz Lev, deputy director-general at the Health Ministry, says the ministry has almost finished drawing up regulations to govern public cord-blood banks, as well as the privately owned ones. Until now the banks have been operating unsupervised.

Israel has three public cord-blood banks, one operated by Magen David Adom, one at Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer, and a third by the organization Bedomaich Chayi.

Cord blood is collected from the umbilical cord and placenta after birth; the blood is rich in stem cells, which are undifferentiated, "primordial" cells. Patients with blood diseases or impaired immune systems can boost their immune systems as stem cells replace unhealthy blood-forming cells with healthy ones.

Cord blood is used in the treatment of immune-impaired patients with leukemia, lymphoma and other blood diseases. (Other sources of blood-forming cells include bone marrow, from which stem cells are harvested. )

Bone-marrow transplants require tissue compatibility between the donor and recipient, hence the practice of testing close relatives. That is not the case with cord blood.

The collected blood is frozen in what is known as cord-blood units. The private banks charge money to store cord blood. The blood units are kept for the donor and her family, and are not generally available without their consent.

The public cord-blood banks act for the general good. They seek to build up as big a pool as possible of cord blood, from donating birth mothers, to help all patients who need bone-marrow transplants. But in practice, the public banks have had trouble accepting donations because of a lack of funding. Now the state, as said, is acting to fund the collection and storage of 1,000 cord-blood units a year.