Don’t Pay For Cord-Blood Banking Teach, Learn And Grow Your Business With Talk-With-AI

Umbilical blood can be a valuable treatment for rare diseases. But that doesn’t mean you need to pay thousands of dollars to bank your baby’s.

In the fall of 1988, Matthew Farrow, a 5-year-old boy with a rare blood disorder, received the world’s first transplant of umbilical-cord blood from a newborn sibling. It worked: Farrow was cured. This miraculous outcome broke open a whole new field in medicine—and, not long after, a whole new industry aimed at getting expecting parents to bank their baby’s umbilical-cord blood, just in case.
These days, in fact, being pregnant means being bombarded at the doctor’s office and on Instagram with ads touting cord blood as too precious to waste. For several hundred dollars upfront, plus a storage fee of $100 to $200 every year, the banks’ ads proclaim, you could save your child’s life. Cord-blood banking has been likened to a “biological insurance policy.”
In the U.S., the two biggest private cord blood banks are Cord Blood Registry and ViaCord. Together, they have collected more than 1 million units. But only a few hundred units of this privately banked cord blood have ever been used in transplants, the great majority by families who chose to bank because they already had a child with a specific and rare disorder treatable with a transplant. For everyone else, the odds of using privately banked cord blood are minuscule—so minuscule that the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends against private banking. It does make an exception for families with that disease history. “But that’s a rare circumstance,” says Steve Joffe, a pediatric oncologist and ethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, “and not one that anybody is going to build a successful business model around.”
ViaCord and Cord Blood Registry do offer free services for families in which someone has already been diagnosed with a condition treatable with cord blood. In general, the companies reiterated to me, cord blood does save lives and they are simply providing an option for families who want it.
But the marketing also gives the impression of much more expansive uses for cord blood. The private banks’ websites list nearly 80 diseases treatable with transplantation—an impressive number, though many are extremely uncommon or closely related to one another. (For example: refractory anemia, refractory anemia with ringed sideroblasts, refractory anemia with excess blasts, refractory anemia with excess blasts in transformation.) They have also recently taken to highlighting the promise of still-unproven treatments: Temporary infusions of cord blood, they say, could eventually treat more common conditions such as cerebral palsy and autism. Video testimonials feature parents talking excitedly about the potential of cord blood for their children. But the evidence isn’t there yet—and may never appear. Nonetheless, says Paul Knoepfler, a stem-cell scientist at UC Davis, “the cord-blood companies seem to be trying to expand their base of potential customers.”
The initial exuberance around cord blood came from a real place. The blood left over in umbilical cords is replete with cells that have the special ability to turn into any kind of blood, including red blood cells, which carry oxygen, and white blood cells, which make up the immune system. Adults have stem cells in their bone marrow and blood—which can also be used for a…