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From a Life to the Lab: Following the Path of Cord Blood Stem Cells

Baby Crying

Those are the first cries of protest from Chelsea Koufman who has existed outside her mom Stella's womb for just a few moments.

Crying, suction

Her mouth and nose are being suctioned so she can take her first few gasps of air - and the umbilical cord that has nurtured her life these last few months is being clamped.

Tower: Ok we're going to clean the cord now.
Another Doctor. : Cord Blood ready when you are

Chelsea's parents are hoping the cord that has given their daughter life, may one day be used to save the life of someone else. They have decided to donate their daughter's cord blood to the Cleveland Cord Blood Center. Once baby Chelsea has been whisked away by nurses, their doctor, Marcus Tower, inserts a needle it the vein of her former umbilical cord and blood begins filling a sterile bag.

Tower: This is a good sample ….
Doctor: Keep milking it, cause when you milk it you always get more

As Dr. Tower gently massages the blood out of the umbilical cord, he explains the reason he's taking such care

Tower: And we actually hope that we never need to use this, but if we, do, this could save someone's life right here … Ok we're good .. Great thanks.

And with that the bag of cord blood is sealed, and the cells that only moments ago pulsed through the veins of an infant begin their out of body journey. First to the laboratory at the Cleveland Cord Blood Center. Every couple of days, a courier picks up the bags of cord blood from the hospital and delivers them to the Cord Blood Center's Laboratory, where Emese Szekeley is waiting.

SZEKELEY: It comes in a big white box… we take it out and there is a timer in it …..

A little TLC is in store for these baby cells when they first arrive - First Szeckley checks their temperature, she weighs them, and then she rocks them for 30 minutes. Of course there IS a scientific purpose to all this. The timer in the box has been recording the temperature continuously so that they can ensure the cells weren't damaged by heat or cold, the bags of cells are placed on a small platform that rocks back and forth to make sure the cells are evenly distributed throughout the bag. And the bags are weighed to determine the total volume of blood that will be processed.

Sound of machine counting cells

The cells are counted to make sure there are enough for a transplant. Mary Laughlin is one of the original pioneers of adult cord blood transplants - she says one of the big hurdles in the field was determining the minimum cell dose for an adult patient

LAUGHLIN: My colleagues at Duke were testing this new stem cell source in children - the thought process at that time was that there were insufficient cells to engraft an adult.

But Laughlin ran the numbers and disagreed. Three new England journal of medicine papers, and several hundred success stories later, she had convinced her colleagues she was right. Today units that contain 900 million cells or more, are saved for freezing and units with fewer cells are sent on to research labs around the country instead.

But first the stem cells are separated from the rest of the blood, typed, it's tested for viruses and infectious disease. And if everything checks out, the packet of stem cells is given an electronic bar code, scanned into the computer and placed into an enormous vat of liquid nitrogen where they are slowly frozen to minus 196 degrees centigrade. And there they will remain until a transplant match is found for them. And when it comes to finding a match, technology is the key Laughlin says.

LAUGHLIN: Our information technology is linked into cordlink which is the national marrow donor program for listing all the inventory in all the banks throughout the country. That involves the transplant center being able to search an international registry literally with one entry of their patients HLA type.

Laughlin says the goal is to make sure that every person who needs a stem cell transplant - regardless of ethnicity - will be able to find a match, and in 3-5 years she thinks that's possible. Currently, public stem cell banks lack sufficient matches for African Americans and other minorities - which is why having a public bank in a place like Cleveland is so important. Gretchen Cuda, 90.3

Tune in tomorrow when Gretchen examines the treatments cord blood is already used for - and the medical therapies that are on the horizon.