Texas Cord Blood
Bank
Reaches New
Milestones
in
Building Life-Saving
Resources
By Norman D. Kalmin, MD
South Texas and its medical community
have a valuable resource in
the Texas Cord Blood Bank (TCBB), as
it continues to reach new milestones in
its goal of helping to save many lives.
Located at San Antonio’s South
Texas Blood and Tissue Center, the
Texas Cord Blood Bank began collecting
cord blood in 2005, and has successfully
banked more than 2,000
units. That puts TCBB well on the way
toward the goal of banking 6,000-
7,000 units within the next three years,
increasing the likelihood of finding
matches for those in need of replacing
hemopoietic cells in the bone marrow.
As a medical professional, being
involved with the Texas Cord Blood
Bank is fulfilling because only in the
last 10 to 15 years has medical science
recognized umbilical cord
blood’s value in treating fatal and
debilitating diseases.
Cord blood, usually discarded with
the placenta following the birth of a
baby, is valuable because, like bone
marrow, it contains stem cells that can
develop into a variety of the cellular
components of blood. It can be used
as an alternative to bone marrow
transplants to treat cancers such as
leukemia and lymphoma, and diseases
of the blood-making system such as
sickle-cell anemia and severe immunesystem
disorders.
It takes time to build a good inventory
of cord blood because only about
one-third of the units collected are
suitable for banking, and TCBB needs a
wide ethnic variety of donors to provide
genetic diversity. Like bone marrow,
numerous factors make it challenging
to find a unit that a patient’s
body will accept and engraft into the
bone marrow. An ethnically diverse
bank of cord blood makes it easier to
find suitable transplants.
For decades, bone marrow transplants
have been the only source of
blood-forming stem cells that doctors
had for treating patients with blood
and immune disorders. Bone marrow
continues to play an important role,
but it is not always easy to locate
healthy individuals to donate bone
marrow that is compatible with the
patients in need.
Today, TCBB collects cord blood at
five Texas hospitals, including two in
San Antonio. Although we are just getting
started, the Texas Cord Blood
Bank has provided five matches for
patients in the past year.
We are thankful that the state chose
the South Texas Blood and Tissue
Center as the location for the Texas
Cord Blood Bank, which works toward
providing an ethnically diverse
resource for all Texans. Funding from
the state Legislature has been essential
to building the TCBB, and generous
private donors made it possible for the
TCBB to take advantage of a matching
state grant.
Recent new funding from the U.S.
Department of Health and Human
Services will allow for the TCBB to
expand and become a truly statewide
resource, as well as an important contributor
to the national Cord Blood
and Marrow registries.
I encourage physicians in San
Antonio to join us in this endeavor by
keeping the Texas Cord Blood Bank in
mind if you have a patient who is
about to deliver a baby. Together, we
can take something that previously
would have been discarded as waste,
and put it to use in saving lives.
Norman Kalmin, MD, is president, CE,
and medical director of the South Texas
Blood & Tissue Center.
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