FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

New York Blood Center

January 23, 2004

A decade of research at the New York Blood Center convinces Congress to provide a large inventory of cord blood stem cell units for critically ill patients in need of transplant.

NEW YORK, NY, January 23, 2004—New York Blood Center. Yesterday, the U.S. Senate passed a $10 million appropriation spearheaded by Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) to create a National Cord Blood Stem Cell Program through a network of FDA qualified cord blood banks. The appropriation jump starts authorizing bills (“Cord Blood Stem Cell Act of 2003”) introduced into the House and Senate last summer.

The appropriation and the Cord Blood Stem Cell Act will provide federal support over five years to build a national inventory of 150,000 high quality cord blood units for public use in patients who need bone marrow reconstitution but do not have suitable bone marrow donors. Senators Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Arlen Specter (R-PA), Sam Brownback (R-KS) and Chris Dodd (D-CT) were the lead sponsors of the bill in the Senate. Christopher Smith (R-NJ), Richard Burr (R-NC), Edolphus Towns (D-NY) and 6 other co-sponsors helped move the House bill forward.

With the legislation, a concept that began as NIH-sponsored research now has become a practical resource for all patients in need of bone marrow transplantation. Drs. Pablo Rubinstein and Cladd E. Stevens, Director and Medical Director of New York Blood Center’s National Cord Blood Program, lauded Senator Specter and the sponsors of the Senate and House bills for their “bold combination of the practical, the necessary and the possible” (New York Daily News, January 2, 2004). Dr. Rubinstein noted gratefully that “patients who actually benefited from our cord blood transplants have been instrumental in showing our Representatives and Senators at hearings in Washington that cord blood transplants really work, clear examples of why this legislation is so critical for patients everywhere.”

The legislation follows after more than 10 years of research at the New York Blood Center in pioneering the use of umbilical cord blood as a source of hematopoietic (blood-forming) stem cells. The Blood Center’s Program began in 1992 with a three-year research grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, which established the world’s first public cord blood bank where mothers donate their babies’ cord blood to anyone who might need it. Over 23,000 donations later and nearly 1,500 patients transplanted at more than 150 clinical centers around the world, the Blood Center’s program has shown that cord blood can be as effective as bone marrow from an unrelated donor. Most importantly, cord blood transplants work well even when not perfectly matched to the patient, a special benefit for patients with rare tissue types and for ethnic minorities.

Every year thousands of patients who cannot find a suitable donor in their own families or among the several million volunteer donors in marrow registries lose their battle against leukemia and other lethal diseases of the blood and immune system and certain rare metabolic diseases. Only 25% of patients seeking a transplant each year actually succeed in finding a donor (report on the national Marrow Donor registry by the Government Accounting Office, October 2002). The statistics are even worse for ethnic minorities. Now, these patients have another effective source of hematopoietic stem cells in banked umbilical cord blood. This new landmark legislation will fund the rapid expansion of an inventory of high quality cord blood units from an ethnically diverse pool of donors, assuring that an estimated 80-90% of patients will be able to find a suitable stem cell transplant.

The New York Blood Center is one of the nation’s largest independent blood collection and distribution organizations, responsible for nearly 10% of the nation’s blood supply. The Center’s Lindsley F. Kimball research Institute is a leader in research on transfusion medicine, conducting both basic and applied research.

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