Our Survey
This is the first cord blood industry report ever issued which is based upon direct interviews of hundreds of family cord blood banks and their marketing affiliates around the world. We have detailed data on both family cord blood storage and family cord tissue storage worldwide, as well as by geographic region or economic environment. This report contains various unique data, statistics, and analyses that have never before been collected and published.
Target Audience
This report is of value to anyone who wants to know how family bank practices and prices vary around the world. All of our presentations are in the form of aggregate statistics; we do not name individual banks.
Directory
The report provides contact information for both public and family cord blood banks worldwide.
Inventory
Worldwide, there are 214 family cord blood banks located in 55 countries. Many of these banks also work with marketing affiliates, so that collectively there are at least 434 providers of family cord blood banking located in 93 countries. The worldwide inventory of family cord blood banks was over 4.1 million through the end of 2014. We compare the geographic distribution of cord blood inventory in family versus public banks.
Therapies Released
Over one thousand therapies had been released from family cord blood banks through the end of 2013, divided pretty evenly between autologous and allogeneic. The autologous therapies are predominantly for various types of brain injury, and more children have received this therapy at Duke University Medical Center than that all other hospitals combined. The most common allogeneic therapy is sibling transplants for thalassemia, which are currently rising rapidly in Asia. The median cumulative release rate of family cord blood banks in our survey is 23 per 100,000 CBU.
Prices
We have developed a metric called the Parent’s Guide Price IndexSM (PGPISM) that takes the price of privately banking perinatal stem cells and storing them for 20 years and adjusts it for the economy of the country in which the bank is doing business. In highly developed nations, the PGPISM metric is 2.3% of the annual income of those parents who are most likely to purchase private cord blood storage. In less developed nations, this metric is harder to evaluate properly, but we estimate that it is about 8% in Latin America and 20% in some parts of Asia.
The cost of cord tissue storage is about half of cord blood storage in most countries where it is offered, but in much of Asia the prices of cord tissue and cord blood storage are comparable.
Quality
The prices of family banks, either for storing cord blood or cord tissue, are set primarily by what their regional market will bear. Bank prices do not show strong correlations with any measure of quality, such as bank accreditation or processing method. The good news here, is that consumers can chose a high quality bank for the same price as a low quality bank. The bad news is that parents do not seem to understand how to evaluate banks, or else they would be willing to pay more for better quality.
Laboratory
We surveyed family banks as to how they process cord blood. There are only a few cord blood processing methods in use, and most banks use either a manual method or Sepax automation. By comparison there are many different collection bags in use, with different brands dominating the market in different regions.
Cord Tissue
Exactly half of the world's family cord blood banks now offer some form of cord tissue storage. We surveyed family banks as to whether they store additional types of stem cells and asked a series of questions specifically about how they handle cord tissue. Banks that offer cord tissue storage tend to have more accreditation than the typical cord blood bank. Methods of cord tissue processing cover a wide variety of protocols. Many banks have not validated their tissue processing method.
Data
Each figure appears in a full page format.We provide an explanation of the statistics tests used in this report and lists of reference data by country.
