R E S O U R C E / Cord Blood Program Achieves Milestone

Cord Blood Program Achieves Milestone



	The Cord Blood Program has stored more than 150 donations and is taking steps to begin making units available for allogeneic transplant.

Puget Sound Blood Center’s Cord Blood Program, under the direction of the Northwest Tissue Services, is one step closer to making the lifesaving resource available to patients nationwide. The Cord Blood Program recently reached 100 units, the minimum required for application to National Marrow Donor Program’s (NMDP) cord blood registry. After completing the registration process with NMDP, the units in the Tissue Services’s program are integrated with NMDP’s database and become available to patients needing stem cell transplants.

Requirements for the Cord Blood Program include a medical director who is a licensed physician and standard operating procedures for collection, donor recruitment, screening, processing, storage and release and return to inventory of unused, cryopreserved units.
More specifically, the NMDP registration process requires a written application, a site visit and collection and labeling which strictly adheres to guidelines established by the American Association of Blood Banks (AABB) or the Foundation for the Accreditation of Hematopoietic Cell Therapy (FAHCT). Other qualification criteria includes:

HLA-A and B, DRBI and ABO/Rh typing
microbial culturing with antibiotic sensitivity for positive cultures
collection of at least one cryopreserved sample available for additional testing
maternal infectious disease screening including medical history and behavioral risk assessment and testing
volume and nucleated cell count.

Currently participation in the Cord Blood Program is available to the Swedish Medical Center campuses in Seattle and the Hawaii Cord Blood Bank at Queen’s Medical Center and Kapiolani Hospital in Honolulu. Both conduct active outreach programs which are expected to increase participation to build an ethnically diverse bank of cord blood, providing all patients a better chance for a matching cord blood donor.

Jonathan Drachman, MD, was recently named Medical Director of the Cord Blood Program. Dr. Drachman, also a research scientist with Puget Sound Blood Center, enthusiastically welcomes the opportunity to be part of this promising new program. “Making the units we’ve already collected available to help patients is our goal,” says Dr. Drachman. “It’s remarkable that something that is usually discarded can be turned into a lifesaving resource.” Dr. Drachman’s research at the Blood Center focuses on the development of megakaryocytes and platelets from primitive marrow cells (stem cells). In addition to his appointments at the Blood Center, Dr. Drachman serves as Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Hematology at the University of Washington School of Medicine.