Welcome to the inaugural issue of the Cord Blood Industry Report from Parent’s Guide to Cord Blood Foundation. This is the first cord blood industry report ever issued which is based upon direct interviews of hundreds of family cord blood banks around the world. We have detailed data on how banks are processing cord blood and/or cord tissue and what they charge for these services.
Banks who participated in our survey are called Participants hereafter. Most of the data in this report was gathered over the time period between the summer of 2014 and the spring of 2015.
This report is the first of its kind. While this report is primarily focused on family cord blood banks, the results should be of value to anyone who operates a cord blood bank, invests in cord blood banks, is a vendor to cord blood banks, or tracks the public health impact of cord blood banks.
Some of the data in this report are in the public domain. For example, lists of which cord blood banks hold certain licenses and accreditations are open access.
Most of the data in this report are confidential. Many family cord blood banks do not wish to publicly reveal the details of their operations and experience. Examples of confidential information could be which vendor supplies they use in their lab, or how many clients have stored cord blood with them.
We have promised confidentiality to all Participants in this report. We promise that we will only present data in anonymized or aggregate formats, so that we do not identify individual banks or patients, except in cases where that data is already in the public domain. We also keep our statistics general in order to stay within the "safety zone" of Antitrust laws.
We have developed a metric called the Parent's Guide Price IndexSM (PGPISM) that adjusts the price of privately banking perinatal stem cells over the course of 20 years for the economy of the country in which the bank is doing business. The PGPISM metric enables us to compare the costs of family cord blood and/or cord tissue storage around the world on a more uniform scale.
The Cord Blood Industry Report is located on a secure website. The report is not sold as a pdf document. Access to the report is obtained by purchasing a license through the Parent’s Guide to Cord Blood Foundation. A standard license comes with 5 user accounts to the website, but there are other options. We are offering 20% off to any organization that was a Participant in our survey, and 20% off for Donors to our Foundation, and these discounts may be combined.
The Parent’s Guide to Cord Blood Foundation is incorporated in the United States as a 501(c)(3) charitable organization. Donations to the Foundation made by US-based individuals and corporate entities are fully tax deductible.
The primary mission of the Parent's Guide to Cord Blood Foundation is to provide parents and their healthcare providers with educational materials about the stem cells in cord blood. We support both cord blood donation for the benefit of public health and/or private banking for the family. Our primary form of outreach is our website at ParentsGuideCordBlood.org. We also distribute educational brochures for expectant parents in multiple languages and fact sheets for medical professionals at DoctorsGuideCordBlood.org.
The secondary mission of the Parent's Guide to Cord Blood Foundation is to analyze new developments in medical research or public policy which could expand the use of cord blood. This report is aligned with that aspect of our founding mission statement.
The Parent’s Guide to Cord Blood was created in memory of Shai Miranda Verter, who died of cancer in 1997. Because our mission began with a sick child and our core service is guiding parents, we are placing 10% of the profits from this report into a separate fund that will be donated to programs that help families seeking cord blood therapies.
Sincerely,
Frances Verter, PhD,
Pedro Silva Couto, MSc,
& the team at Parent’s Guide to Cord Blood Foundation