Cord Blood Banking Curative Benefits Often Oversold to Parents: NYT Investigation

Investigations of cord blood banks have found leaky storage bags and bacterial contamination that often makes the preserved stem cells useless.

Marketed to parents as a way to potentially save their child’s life in the future, cord blood banking may be more of a scam than a lifesaving choice, according to a new investigative report published by the New York Times.

Nationwide, millions of parents have paid to have blood from their umbilical cord preserved. This service withdraws blood from their infant’s umbilical cord at birth and is stored in cord blood banks for years.

Although cord banks claim the stem cells from the umbilical cord have the potential to offer life-saving treatment options for the future in case a child becomes seriously ill, the New York Times report indicates that many retrieved cord blood samples contain bacteria that renders them unusable, or the samples don’t contain enough cord blood to be used for a transfusion.

Promising future health technology

Cord blood banking was marketed as a new and promising technology in the 1990s, which could provide a valuable source of stem cells. Doctors and nurses have often encouraged patients to take samples of blood from their child’s umbilical cord at birth, and pay to store it with cord blood banks for future use.

The retrieval process required parents to thousands of dollars upfront, and hundreds more in storage costs every year. However, new medical advancements in recent years have resulted in a decline of cord blood transfusions, and the need for cord blood banking.

In 2010, cord blood transplants peaked at more than 800 per year. But by 2023, only 346 cord blood transplants occurred, according to data from National Marrow Donor Program (NMPD), a nonprofit that coordinates stem cell donations.

The report indicates transplant doctors began trending away from using cord blood, in favor of using stem cell donations from adults. In fact, the New York Blood Center, the country’s largest public cord blood bank, stopped collecting cord blood in 2020.

Cord Blood Banking Problems

Cord blood banks, like the Cord Blood Registry (CBR), ViaCord, and Cryo-Cell, advertise banking as a way to perfectly match their child with stem cells. But the truth is for many conditions, like leukemia, using a child’s own stem cells is useless because those cells are also likely to become cancerous.

Banks advertised that cord blood can treat up to 80 conditions, but most of those are rare blood and immune disorders. Most treatments that use privately banked cord blood are considered experimental, and in many cases where the blood could be used, transplant doctors opt for other treatments, according to the report.

The New York Times investigation found that in more than half of cases, when parents attempt to retrieve the cord blood to use it for transplants, the blood is contaminated with microbes or the samples are too small to use. But cord blood banks often fail to notify parents of that while continuing to collect yearly storage fees.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) visited the CBR facility, which is owned by CooperSurgical and stores more than one million samples, and found multiple problems and violations, including leaky storage bags and abundant bacterial growth.

More so, private banks use small print disclosures to indicate to parents the odds of using the stem cells are low and clinical trials often don’t work.

The Times investigation found that many cord blood banks pay kickbacks to nurses and doctors to promote the practice. They often pay doctors $200 to $700 per collection, and the kickbacks are exempt from reporting since insurance doesn’t cover it.

Many transplant doctors interviewed by New York Times journalists said there was no use paying to store cord blood. Most children who need stem cell transplants don’t have trouble finding donors, and legitimate uses for cord blood are “almost nonexistent.”

However, some cord blood banks told the New York Times reports that they still believe in the promise of cord blood stem cells, indicating they have been used to save children’s lives, and that there may be scientific breakthroughs in the future that find more uses for them.