Cord blood banks are mainly of two types, i.e. public cord blood banks and Private Banks. Normally, public cord blood banks are set up to facilitate umbilical stem cell research for disease treatment and for utilization in transplants of non-relatives. If you decide to save your baby's cord blood at a public cord blood bank, they won?t provide you the link between your baby and her cord blood unit. Therefore, in time of need, there is no guarantee that you will be able to access your baby?s cord blood unit. On the contrary, if you donate your baby's cord blood to a private bank, no one else is authorized to access and use that particular cord blood unit without your permission.
Your baby's cord blood can be preserved in either a private cord blood bank or a public bank. The main purpose of these banks is the processing and cord blood storage. If the storage center is public, then the blood cells cannot be permanently entitled to the donor. Here the donors can be ensured units of cord blood, but not necessarily that his own. The donor is mostly likely to be a stranger. The cost of preservation in such banks is comparatively lower than the private banks offering cord blood banking facility.
Nevertheless, private blood banks do have their own share of obstacles. The cost of cord blood storage in private banks is quite high and is likely to discourage many. The biggest attraction towards private cord blood banks is the guarantee that the cord blood a patient preserves, will not be used by anyone else, unless the donor himself permits. Compared to the lower chances of cord blood cells transplants in a child, storage prices charged by these banks are relatively quite high.
These banks save your samples for free, but make profit by selling the cord blood units for research. The selling of freely stored blood is legal in US, but illegal in several Asian and European nations.
A private bank is an independent unit and not owned by the state. As mentioned earlier, ONLY YOU are entitled to access and use your cord blood sample. Such banks charge around $500 to $2,000 to store the sample. The charges vary with different private banks. Besides this, there is a maintenance fee or handling fee, which comes to around $100 annually.
These are another kind of banks, which were set up in the early 2000?s. The cord blood samples stored in such banks are not used for transplants, but ONLY for research. The banks take your samples for free and use them in their own research or sell them to other researchers.
