Nearly 75,000 samples of umbilical cord blood have been stored at Royan Institute’s public and private banks. The figure was 65,000 samples last year that ended in March, said Saeed Abroun, technical director at the institute, on the sidelines of the scientific conference on therapeutic potential of stem cells held Thursday in Bojnourd, North Khorsan Province.
In private banks, samples are stored just for the donor family and therefore a fee is charged. The cost of collection and genetic testing is about $580 and the annual charge for storage is $30, IRNA quoted him as saying. He said umbilical cord blood transplantation for treatment of leukemia is performed in Imam Khomeini Hospital and Ali Asghar Children Hospital in Tehran as well as at Imam Reza Hospital in Mashhad, Khorasan Razavi Province.
Umbilical blood is a valuable source of hematopoietic stem cells which can be used for treatment of many malignant diseases such as leukemia, lymphoma, sickle cell anemia, and others.
