Umbilical cord bank possible for Spokane

Parents of Spokane’s first baby of 2007 gladly would have celebrated their son’s birth by donating his umbilical cord blood to a public bank to save the life of someone else.

“We’d think of it kind of like donating organs,” said Joshua Armstrong, a Gonzaga University administrator and father of three young boys, including eight-week old Owen.

“I would think it would be something that we’d be interested in.”

Trouble was, there was no local process in place to allow Armstrong, 34, and his wife, Shawna, 33, to follow the instincts of their conscience – and recent recommendations of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

That may change under a tentative plan that has garnered support – but no formal agreement – from local hospital and blood center officials and the only public cord blood bank in Washington.

Spokane could be the next market admitted by the Puget Sound Blood Center in Seattle, where organizers last year received $500,000 of some $12 million in federal funds to establish a national system of public cord blood banks.

Under the arrangement, parents across the Inland Northwest would be able for the first time to collect birth material rich in stem cells – the building blocks of blood – and donate it to a new national network aimed at saving some 12,000 lives a year.

“They are definitely on our list for collaborating,” said Jo-Anna Reems, the center supervisor. “This is one of our objectives right now, to expand to Alaska or Spokane.”

This area is particularly appealing because of the potential for cord blood donations by Native Americans and other minorities, Reems said. Cord blood transplants must be matched by tissue type, and a serious shortage of an array of blood types suitable for all races now exists.

The Seattle bank was one of only six in the nation to receive funding through the Health Resources and Services Administration, which hopes to add 150,000 units of ethnically diverse cord blood available for use by anyone.

Gathering umbilical cord blood from some of the 7,600 babies born in Eastern Washington and North Idaho is not a new idea. Officials at the Inland Northwest Blood Center worked hard on a grant last year that would have set up a screening and transportation system in conjunction with the Puget Sound center, said Ellen Klohe, director of the agency’s tissue typing laboratory.

“We get lots of questions from people who want to do it and why wouldn’t they?” she said. “It’s something that goes in the trash can otherwise.”

But the arrangement depended on state funding from Washington that didn’t materialize, which also torpedoed a federal grant.

The new resources in Seattle may make all the difference, she said.

“I’m happy to have a conversation with them. They need to decide how they want to spend their money,” Klohe said. “We’re happy to talk to them when they’re ready to talk to us.”

That message was echoed by officials at Sacred Heart Medical Center in Spokane, where umbilical cord blood from nearly 3,000 babies born each year could be a boon.

“I would love to be able to donate it, for parents to have that option,” said Donna Bauer, nurse manager of the hospital’s BirthPlace. “Now, it’s just discarded as medical waste.”

Recent meetings with the hospital’s newborn advisory council revealed support for cord blood collection among pediatricians and obstetricians, Bauer said.

When Bauer called the Puget Sound center, however, she was told the agency wasn’t accepting new hospitals. That was a mistake, said Doug Mora, cord program coordinator for the Puget Sound center.

“Right now we’re not accepting new hospitals, but Spokane is different,” he said.

Arrangements are far from certain, everyone associated with a potential agreement emphasized. Organizers still must decide on issues from staffing levels and screening protocols to funding requirements – and the dilemmas involved with transporting perishable blood products across the state within a window of 40 hours, tops, Mora said.

“The next step is to figure out how it’s going to work on the ground,” he said. “We’d all like to see it sooner rather than later.”

By November, the Puget Sound center plans to collect 600 units of usable cord blood, including about half from minority donors, said Mora. That more than doubles the 250 units the now center collects each year, he added.

Adding Spokane would boost the general supply as well as the minority ranks – and it would increase the center’s funding. Blood banks are reimbursed for each unit they collect, with higher payments for the much-needed minority donations, Reems said.

The public banks are an alternative to more widely used private banks, which in recent years have been heavily marketed to upscale parents who pay $2,000 to collect their newborns’ cord blood and about $125 a year to store it.

It’s billed as a hedge against future illness, but the nation’s pediatricians last month issued guidelines recommending that parents donate to public, not private, banks. The American Academy of Pediatrics said parents should turn to private banks only if their child’s older sibling already has cancer or a genetic illness treatable with cord blood.

“The likelihood of them using it in a private setting is a lot less than in a public setting,” explained Reems.

The benefits of donating cord blood are obvious, Klohe said. The cells are more malleable than adult blood stem cells, so a perfect match isn’t always required.

Patients who turn to cord blood therapy often have exhausted other options, and for them, a successful transplant is nothing less than a miracle.

Organizers here have to balance that potential with the practical obstacles of creating and maintaining a new program, however.

“It’s very doable,” Klohe said. “It’s something we’d be interested in, but we’d need to be able to do it in a way that supported the goals of the national program as well as didn’t take away from our existing programs.

“We just can’t lose money on it.”