(The 20 page Executive Summary and the approximately 300 page long complete report can be purchased from the Institute of Medicine or can be read free of charge by clicking HERE. Some extracts are provided below.)

The Institute of Medicine report, released on April 14, 2005, states that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services should establish a new National Cord Blood Policy Board to set rules for the donation, collection, and use of lifesaving stem cells derived from donated umbilical cord blood.

"Hematopoietic progenitor cells (HPCs) obtained from cord blood appear to have some advantages of HPCs obtained from bone marrow or peripheral blood. Importantly, immune cells from umbilical cord blood are less mature than those from other sources, so their transplantation results in a lower risk of graft-versus-host disease, a common immune response to transplantation that can be fatal. In addition, cord blood is readily available, carries a low potential for infectious disease transmission, and involves minimal risk to the mother or the infant at the time of collection."

Because of these advantages over bone marrow, cord blood has the potential to be an excellent resource, opening up the possibility of transplantation to patients who either can not find a human leukocyte antigen (HLA) match within the bone marrow donor pool, or who were too ill to be able to wait for the sometimes lengthy process of searching and then harvesting bone marrow from living adult donors. Three-quarters of the patients who require a transplant of HPCs do not have a relative whose cells would be a suitable match and must turn to public bone marrow donor registries or umbilical cord blood banks for donated cells. By increasing the size and quality of the cord blood inventory, nearly 90 percent of all patients who need a transplant should be able to find a suitable match from either cord blood banks or marrow donor registries, the report says.

The committee estimates that at least an additional 100,000 new, high-quality cord blood units are needed in the national inventory. It is important that the determination of the final inventory size take into account clinical, policy, and economic interest.

The committee's central charge was to advise the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) on how a National Cord Blood Stem Cell Bank Program should be structured. They attempted to incorporate the following goals into the final structure of the network: