Marketing of cord blood biobanks comes under fire

Private companies mislead expectant parents about the value of storing umbilical cord blood for future medical use, investigations in the UK and USA have concluded.

The banking and freezing of umbilical cord blood from babies has become popular with parents in the past few decades. This blood contains stem cells which can be used to treat some conditions, should the child develop them later in life. Banking with private companies usually costs several thousands of pounds upfront, plus an annual storage fee every year onwards.

In response to one company's claim that umbilical cord stem cells 'can become almost any tissue type in the body and may even be used to regrow entire organs,' Professor Charles Murry, director at the Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine at the University of Washington told the BMJ: 'There were people making these claims in the late 1990s – that these cells have the plasticity to become other things – but that's been very rigorously disproven.' 

Umbilical cord blood contains hematopoietic stem cells, which can develop into various types of blood cells, and mesenchymal stem cells, which play a crucial role in repairing certain body tissues. However, these stem cells can only generate blood cells or connective tissues, limiting the conditions they could provide therapeutic benefit for.

While future work may explore transforming stem cells into a pluripotent state with unlimited differentiation potential, this would require advanced scientific expertise and be costly. Additionally, many conditions do not require treatment with stem cells from the same individual and can instead be treated with cells from a donor, or from cells taken as an adult.

The British Medical Journal (BMJ) found that private biobanks exaggerated the potential medical benefits of umbilical cord blood. Companies like Cells4Life, SmartCells, and Future Health Biobank claimed extensive applications of cord blood stem cells. The list of treatment possibilities claimed by Future Health Biobank included over 75 disorders which experts say are unrealistic. The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists has advised against commercial cord blood banking unless there is a specific medical need.

In a separate investigation, the New York Times (NYT) also found evidence that companies such as Cord Blood Registry (CBR), ViaCord and Cryo-Cell misrepresented the benefits of umbilical cord blood banking, broadly claiming that their banked cells were lifesaving. Most of the 80 conditions CBR claimed could be treated with cord blood stem cells are exceedingly rare. Furthermore, the NYT found that most banked cord blood samples remain unused, with banked samples often unusable due to too little volume or contamination from microbes.

Jenna Edwards from Florida, whose son has cerebral palsy, told NYT that she spent over $3000 US banking his cord blood. When her son had the opportunity to use the cord blood in a clinical trial two years later, she was told that it had been contaminated with bacteria within weeks of the birth, but she had not been notified and the company had continued to charge her. That was in 2017, but FDA inspectors found evidence of bacterial growth at another bank's facility in January this year.