Initiative will help make life-saving stem
cell therapy available to more patients
$1 million awarded to CU Cord Blood Bank
The University of Colorado Cord Blood Bank (UCCBB) has been awarded $1 million in federal funding by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) to assist in establishing a national cord blood inventory of 150,000 cord blood units. UCCBB will use the money to process and preserve additional cord blood units at its facility in Aurora, where units will be made accessible to patients nationwide through a coordinating center.
UCCBB is slated to receive up to $6.6 million over the next three years to bank up to 4,600 cords, pending continued funding by Congress in 2007 and 2008.
The principal investigator on the contract, Brian Freed, PhD, professor of medicine at the University of Colorado Denver’s School of Medicine and executive director of ClinImmune Labs, said: “We are proud that the University of Colorado Cord Blood Bank was chosen by HRSA to participate in this national effort to expand the supply of umbilical cord blood.
“ A number of exciting studies published in the past 10 years strongly indicate that umbilical cord blood transplantation is, in many cases, an excellent therapy for many of the 10,000 patients for whom a bone marrow transplant donor cannot be identified,” he said. “This contract will give our bank, several Colorado hospitals, and a number of Colorado mothers donating their newborn babies’ cords, the opportunity to expand our bank’s cord blood inventory and give the gift of life to others throughout the world.”
