The New York Blood Center's National Cord Blood Program (NCBP) was conceived in 1989 and launched in 1992 with a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. It was founded to investigate cord blood as a possible solution to a critical public health need: finding appropriate hematopoietic transplants for patients who have no matched bone marrow donors.

Today, more than 33,000 banked cord blood units and over 2,000 transplanted patients later, the NCBP is the largest non-profit public cord blood bank in the world. NCBP now collects more than 5,000 new units each year and will soon expand to over 7,000. We are committed to increasing our inventory more than three-fold over the next five years to improve substantially the probability that patients, both children and adults, can find a suitable cord blood match with a good cell dose.

The New York Blood Center's NCBP has teams of trained technicians and nurses working in six collaborating hospitals [See Collection Sites] to collect cord blood. Staff in our Processing Laboratory process and freeze the cord blood units and store them in liquid nitrogen freezers, ready to go whenever needed. Each unit is tested for the number of cells. The unit and the mother are also tested for HLA type and certain transmissible infectious diseases. NCBP staff work with Transplant Centers to select the best available unit for each individual patient, drawing on what we have learned from units already transplanted. Prior to transplantation, we confirm the HLA type of the patient and cord blood unit. Dr. Pablo Rubinstein, the NCBP Director, and Dr. Cladd Stevens, the Program's Medical Director, are available to Transplant Center physicians and coordinators for consultation on cord blood unit selection.

We are committed to providing high quality cord blood units and promoting high standards in cord blood banking. The New York Blood Center's National Cord Blood Program was the first cord blood bank to receive NetCord-FACT accreditation. We also work under a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) IND (investigational new drug) exemption. The FDA has not yet issued rules for licensure and federal supervision of cord blood banking. We believe that FDA licensure is critical to assuring that all patients get high quality cord blood, no matter what bank it comes from and have contributed to the process [See Milestones]. NCBP vigorously encourages FDA oversight.