Advocacy and Market Expansion – Our Top Priorities
Quarterly Report from the CBA President 

The Cord Blood Association Board of Directors meets quarterly, and the board’s Executive Committee meets every two weeks.  President Joanne Kurtzberg provides a report to the directors at its quarterly meetings.  Presented below is the report that she delivered to the Board at its meeting in March 2016.


 

kurtzberg

As we embark upon the second year of the CBA, there is a lot to talk about. While we have many accomplishments to be proud of, we, and the cord blood field, also have many challenges ahead.

Since the last meeting of the Board of Directors in January, the CBA has made progress on many fronts. We are collaborating with the International Society for Cellular Therapy (ISCT) to sponsor and program a pre-conference day at its annual meeting in Singapore, and also signed a memorandum of understanding with the AABB to work together on the design and programming of the International Cord Blood Symposium (ICBS) in June. Several CBA members have participated on the organizing and programming committees to restructure and strengthen the meeting this year.

Advocacy

The CBA working committees have continued to forge ahead, some meeting monthly.  We’ve also continued our efforts in Washington, DC, with the signing of the reauthorization of the C.W. Bill Young Program which funds the National Cord Blood Inventory, the BeTheMatch/NMDP unrelated donor registry, coordinating centers at the NMDP and the outcomes database at the Center for International Blood and Marrow Transplant Research (CIBMTR).   More recently, we have been involved in guiding the drafting of legislation to modify the regulatory pathway for cord blood and cord tissues in regenerative medicine through the REGROW Act which was introduced in the U.S. Congress last week.

I’m writing this message to you as I return from a brief trip to China where I toured a wonderful hybrid cord blood bank in Guandzhou.  We talked about the CBA, and their leadership was most interested in having the opportunity for an organization with authority to help guide the Chinese government in creating regulations for cord blood banking.  As is the experience in many countries, cord blood is a new type of product that doesn’t fit into the mold created for drug regulations.  Our Government and Public Affairs Committee, ably led by Geoff Crouse, is developing a strategic plan to address these issues.  They are starting by working to advance global connections and beginning to study aspects of global regulations with a vision to simplify and enable the transfer and use of cord blood and cord tissue products around the world.  Global participation in the CBA is the key to the success of the association and must be prioritized over the coming year.

Good and Bad News

There is both good news and bad news about the state of the cord blood field.  First the bad news.  The use of cord blood as an allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell source for hematopoietic reconstitution has, at best, stabilized.  Realistically, it is unlikely that this use of cord blood will increase in the next few years.  The costs of cord blood transplantation, both the unit and the hospitalization and supportive care required by the patient in the first month’s post-transplant are higher than those incurred with the use of other donor sources.  Some transplant programs are choosing other donor sources, e.g. haplo-identical related donors, over cord blood to take advantage of early cost savings despite the fact that long-term outcomes are better when unrelated cord blood Is used as the donor source.  It is my hope that the Scientific Affairs Committee will help provide ideas to study long-term outcomes of cord blood transplantation as well as highlight, for the community, perhaps on the website, the recent advances in cord blood expansion and bridging products to enhance engraftment as the CBA’s initial approach to this problem.  We might even consider applying for a grant to fund the CIBMTR to analyze and write a manuscript about this topic so that we get the message about overall successes of unrelated donor cord blood transplantation out to the community.  If the CBA doesn’t take the initiative to make this happen, I don’t think it will!

The good news is that the studies of cord blood and cord tissues in regenerative medicine are increasing and results in early clinical trials in patients look promising.  I believe that regenerative medicine applications will be the next major market for cord products and that the CBA needs to broadcast these advances, step by step, on behalf of our members and the broader cord blood community.  A place to start would be to list (and update monthly), the ongoing clinical trials using cord blood and derivative products on the CBA website.  A second idea would be to write a short piece on a monthly basis about each of the promising novel expansion technologies.  These could be archived for our membership to use for reference over time.  We could also begin a service to list “key publications” about cord blood and related tissues each month on the website. 

More good news:  Our website (thanks to Karen Ballen and her task force) and a planned blog (thanks to Claudia Zylberberg) are moving along but ready for the next step. In addition, Alpha Med Press, publisher of the journals Stem Cells and Stem Cells Translational Medicine, has generously offered to give the CBA a section in their journals, on an ongoing basis, to publish new work and reviews of the field.  This is a great opportunity to increase the CBA’s visibility for readers of these journals.  

Membership Growth

I’m delighted to announce the recent arrival of new member cord blood banks (Sino Cell Technologies in Taipei, Taiwan, and StemCyte-India in Gandhinagar, India) and new corporate partners (Terumo BCT in Lakewood, Colorado, and Taburit Cord Blood Solutions in Ramat Hasharon, Israel).  One of our biggest challenges that remains front and center before the CBA Board of Directors is recruitment of new member banks, industry partners and individuals.  Without additional members and shared resources, we cannot be successful.

I look forward to discussing these ideas with you during our Board of Directors meeting and thank each of you for your participation in and commitment to the success of the CBA.

Joanne Kurtzberg, MD
President