NHS Cord Blood Bank

Following the successful cord blood transplant performed in 1988 in a patient with Fanconi’s anaemia, more than 8,000 transplants have now been performed worldwide. This has required the establishment of banks to store cord blood units from altruistic donations which can be readily available to any patient in need of a haemopoietic stem cell transplant.

The first public cord blood bank was established in 1993 in New York by Professor Pablo Rubinstein and at present there are more than 54 cord blood banks world-wide with over 300,000 frozen units available for transplantation.

The NHS-Cord Blood Bank (formerly The London Cord Blood Bank) was established in 1996 under the guidance of Professor Marcela Contreras and is at present the only internationally accredited public bank in the UK. The NHS-CBB has banked nearly 10,000 units and we have issued over 160 units to patients world-wide.

One of our aims when establishing the bank was to try to increase the number of cord blood units from ethnic minority donors in order to compensate for the lack of representation of these donors in the established bone marrow donor registries. To date more than 40% of the banked units are from ethnic minorities thus increasing the genetic diversity of the bank.

The storage of high quality units suitable for transplantation requires the contribution and commitment of a varied group of healthcare professionals, all playing a pivotal role in the complex chain of operations. I have been privileged to have been involved with the NHS Cord Blood Bank and such a group of people since the very beginning.

Thus, cord blood is an important alternative source of haemopoietic stem cells for patients in need of a transplant, particularly for those patients from ethnic minorities expressing tissue types not present in established bone marrow donor registries.

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