How are Cord Blood Stem Cells Collected and Banked?

After delivery of your child, the umbilical cord blood, which is typically discarded, is easily collected resulting in no risk or stress to mother or baby. The Genesis Bank will provide you with a customized collection kit complete with all the necessary supplies and directions so your caregivers can easily recover your child's umbilical cord blood and ship the precious material to our lab.

When your child's cord blood arrives at our lab, it is assigned a unique identifier that will allow us to track the cells throughout processing, preservation and banking. The stem cells will be concentrated, and the blood will be tested for sterility, blood type, cell count and viability (live vs. dead cells).

The cells are then cryopreserved (frozen) using methods developed by our own scientists through grants from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health¹. The frozen cells are stored in our secure 24 hour alarm monitored cryostorage tanks. Because temperature is maintained through the use of nitrogen vapor, these tanks rely on no mechanical parts and require no external power source to keep samples frozen. Once securely banked in our systems, your cells are protected from virtually all biological degradation.

¹ A novel frozen storage system for cord blood stem cells; NIH (NHLBI), Grant Number: 2R44HL65864-02; Awarded to Dr. E.J. Woods as Principal Investigator.