Are the costs incurred by private banks the same as at non-profit cord blood registries?
Absolutely NOT. At non-profit registries, laboratory labor and testing account for over 70% of total cost. When a blood product is stored for public use it is subjected to very rigorous testing. A sample that fails any test would be “discarded” (actually, used for research instead of banked). About half of samples are rejected simply because they are low volume. Many of these tests are skipped by private banks, and they don’t have a stringent minimum volume. If the day ever comes that you want to transplant a private sample, you may find that the transplant physician does not want to use it because it fails a test (ex: presence of contaminating bacteria, or Hepatitis virus, etc.) Also bear in mind that samples in a public donor registry all undergo HLA-typing, which is expensive (it costs hundreds of dollars for a single test, but is cheaper with a volume discount). None of the private banks still perform HLA-typing.
