Cleveland Cord Blood Center expands collection through 2 area hospitals

Diana Tirpak considers herself a living example of the greatest recycling program on the planet.

Two years ago, her life was saved by something most hospitals treat as trash ’ the umbilical cord blood from a newborn.

A baby’s cord blood is rich with stem cells, which increasingly are being used to cure cancer and other blood disorders.

”I am a living, breathing end product of the most exciting, amazing recycling program on the face of the earth,” she said. ”It’s recycled blood. What better way of recycling than that?”

A nonprofit program is trying to expand throughout Northeast Ohio so more parents can donate their babies’ potentially life-saving gift of umbilical cord blood.

The Cleveland Cord Blood Center is working with Summa Health System in Akron and MetroHealth Medical Center in Cleveland to add those hospitals as donation collection sites.

The only hospitals currently collecting umbilical cord blood for the public bank are the Cleveland Clinic’s Hillcrest Hospital in Mayfield Heights and Fairview Hospital in Cleveland.

Transplants and research using stem cells from umbilical cord blood avoid the ethical and political baggage that goes along with human embryonic stem cells, said Dr. Mary J. Laughlin, founder and medical director of the Cleveland Cord Blood Center in Warrensville Heights.

With umbilical cord blood donations, the blood isn’t collected until after the delivery of a full-term, healthy baby.

”Umbilical cord blood has been quietly emerging in the field,” said Laughlin, an associate professor of medicine at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and a pioneer in the field of cord blood transplants.

During a transplant, the stem cells in a baby’s cord blood respond to proteins released by the recipient’s damaged bone marrow cells, Laughlin said.

The stem cells ”hone to the bone marrow, set up shop and start making blood cells,” she said.

In Tirpak’s case, the 68-year-old Boston Heights resident was told she would die within months without a transplant to cure her leukemia.

When a bone marrow donor couldn’t be found, her doctors at University Hospitals Ireland Cancer Center found a cord blood match.

Tirpak doesn’t know the identity of the baby who saved her life; recipients aren’t provided that information.

But her 9-year-old grandson has nicknamed the baby ”Mary Calls.”

”It sounds like ‘miracles,’ ” he told her, ”and that’s what’s going to make you well.”

”It’s a marvelous thing,” she said. ”I’ve been blessed with many days and I hope for many more still yet to be.”

The Cleveland Cord Blood Center is one of 16 public cord blood banks in the United States, according to the National Marrow Donor Program.

The program maintains a registry of available cord blood units in public banks and potential bone marrow donors that transplant centers can search for matches for their patients.

Public cord blood banks differ from private banks, which allow new parents to pay to store a newborn’s cord blood in case it’s needed by the child or another family member in the future.

There is no charge to donate a newborn’s cord blood to a public blood bank, said Dave Clements, the Cleveland Cord Blood Center’s director of business development, government relations and community affairs.

Each donated unit is tested to make sure it is disease-free and contains enough stem cells. A unit must have at least 1.3 billion stem cells to be frozen in liquid nitrogen and stored for future transplantation.

Units ineligible for transplants can be used for research.

If a baby whose umbilical cord blood has been donated later needs stem cells for a transplant, the unit can be returned to the patient if it was stored and not used, Clements said. If the unit is no longer available, the center will work with the patient to find a suitable match worldwide for free.

Cord blood banks charge about $30,000 per unit to help cover the costs of testing, collection and storage, Clements said.

The hospital conducting the procedure pays for the unit and charges patients or their insurer.

Since starting the voluntary collection program at the two Cleveland-area hospitals in 2008, the center has obtained about 5,500 donated units of cord blood, of which 1,800 were able to be banked, Clements said. More than half of new moms at the hospitals now are opting to donate cord blood after delivery.

There is no compensation to the donor family.

The delivering physician collects the blood for donation from the umbilical cord only with parental consent, said Dr. Marcus Tower, chairman of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Hillcrest Hospital. The process takes about two minutes.

”Every time we collect this, this is basically one life we can be saving,” he said. ”It’s very altruistic. This is something that could save my life, your life or anyone’s life.”

So far, five units have been shipped overnight from the Cleveland Cord Blood Center to transplant centers in the United States and worldwide.

The Cleveland Cord Blood Center relies heavily on financial donations to help cover its $3 million annual budget.

The center is trying to partner with area businesses and philanthropic groups to raise money to cover the cost of adding more collection site hospitals, estimated at $250,000 per site, Clements said.

By expanding to different hospitals, the cord blood bank can boost its donations, as well as increase the diversity of its available cord blood units.

”One of our missions is to make sure everybody has an opportunity to donate, regardless of their ethnicity,” Clements said.

Cord blood donations can be particularly important for African-Americans and patients from other minority groups who need a transplant but often have a difficult time finding a bone marrow match.

White adult patients have a 60 percent chance of finding an unrelated match among potential bone marrow donors, compared to a 5 percent to 15 percent chance among some minority groups, Laughlin said.

”Your tissue typing follows your ethnic background,” she explained.

Unlike donations from adults, cord blood donations don’t need to be a perfect match, Laughlin said. The baby’s immature immune system isn’t as likely to have a strong negative reaction to the recipient’s body.

About half of the 3,000 to 3,500 babies born each year at MetroHealth Medical Center are from minority populations, said Dr. Brian Mercer, the hospital’s director of obstetrics and maternal-fetal medicine.

The cord blood donation program offers ”a great opportunity to provide this for a broad range of people,” he said. ”It’s very exciting because it’s a public cord blood bank. That means it will make stem cells available to anybody and makes it available not just nationally but internationally.”

Summa’s Akron City Hospital ’ another site that could be added as a donation center in the future ’ had 3,480 births in 2009.

”We are involved with discussions with the Cleveland Cord Blood Center about the possibility of beginning a donation program at Summa,” spokesman Mike Bernstein said. ”It’s our hope that we will find opportunities to work together, but we are very early in the process and it is premature to discuss the specifics.”