Private family banks specialize in testing, processing and storing umbilical cord blood stem cells for a family's own use, should they ever be needed. When banking privately, the stem cells belong to the family and cannot be used without the family's permission.

Fees vary by family bank, but usually consist of a collection kit fee, a processing and testing fee, and an annual storage fee.

Why Are Some Families Storing Privately?

Families who choose to bank their child's cord blood stem cells privately usually do so because they feel it offers them an extra security precaution. The stem cells are stored before a child's exposure to bacterial, viral and other environmental factors, and before any environmental damage can occur. They provide a perfect match for the child from whom they are collected, thus eliminating the process of a matching donor and the risks of rejection.

The banked cells also provide a one-in-four match for siblings, an important factor for most women as Government statistics show 59% of all pregnant women already have one or more children in the family.

The cells may also hold the promise of treatment for parents, grandparents, even cousins, as biological matches are more common between family members.

While stem cells are being used today to treat over 70 life-threatening diseases, researchers are now also looking to cord blood for possible answers to heart disease, diabetes, stroke, muscular dystrophy, as well as how to regenerate and repair damaged tissue, due to aging.

"Within just a few years, the possibility that the human body contains cells that can repair and regenerate damaged and diseased tissue has gone from an unlikely proposition to a virtual certainty. Adult stem cells have been isolated from numerous adult tissues, umbilical cord, and other non-embryonic sources, and have demonstrated a surprising ability for transformation into other tissue and cell types and for repair of damaged tissues." (www.stemcellresearch.org, David Prentice, PhD)

Collecting and Storing Stem Cells

Collecting a baby's cord blood is a simple, safe and painless procedure that occurs in the delivery room moments after a baby is born. Once the umbilical cord is cut from the baby, the blood remaining in the cord is collected by the delivery specialist. The process is completely non-invasive and does not interrupt the birthing procedure.

The blood is then shipped overnight to the chosen family bank where it is given a unique identification code, tested, processed, separated and cryogenically stored in liquid nitrogen for the family, until such time as it may be needed.