An expert who spoke on condition of anonymity said the question of private cord-blood banking is a growing issue in medical circles. Most common blood diseases can be cured with chemotherapy, while for serious blood diseases, autologous cord-blood transplants won't work. The patients have to turn to other donors for matching stem cells.

Mao Qun'an, spokesman of the Ministry of Health, called for a more objective analysis on the clinical value of privately banked cord-blood. He said both excessively positive and excessively negative commentary on private cord-blood banking should be avoided. Cord-blood banks should let customers decide whether to bank their cord-blood privately or not based on the availability of objective information. Exaggeration should be forbidden.

Public banks versus private banks

To date China has established six cord-blood banks in Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Guangdong, Sichuan and Shandong. All the banks keep samples from both private storage and public donation. Because of insufficient government investment, cord-blood banks usually support the storage of public donations with the profits from their private storage service.

According to Tang Peixian, such an operating model will probably result in a tendency to give priority to the private service rather than the public interest. He suggested that public banks funded by the government should be separated from private banks run by companies.

In contrast Pei Xuetao, director of the Institute of Blood Transfusion, Academy of Military Medical Sciences, said the current model suits China's specific circumstances. He suggested that the banks control the balance between private and public storage to prevent banks from excessive commercialization.

Standard practice around the world is to separate private banks from public banks which are often funded by government.

Public donation versus private storage

Statistics show that 25,000 donated cord-blood samples had been stored in China's public cord-blood banks by the end of January, 2008, compared with 80,000 privately banked samples. According to the Ministry of Health, a constant stock of 70,000 to 100,000 samples of umbilical cord-blood is sufficient to satisfy current clinical demands for treating the relevant afflictions of child patients across the whole country.

However, the privately-banked samples cannot be used to treat others because they have not been through any matching test. As a result, lots of privately-banked samples are left unused in the cord-blood banks, while many patients waiting to be treated fail to get stem cells to match. Yu Li, director of the Hematology Department, Chinese PLA General Hospital, suggests citizens donate cord-blood instead of storing it for one particular individual. Mao Qun'an also said the government would like to see more citizens consciously donating their life-saving stem cells to the cord-blood banks.

(China.org.cn by Li Xiao, April 28, 2009)