How Cord Banking WorksCell Care offers complete online enrolment. It’s a simple 4-step process that takes 10 minutes to complete:
1. Choose cord blood or cord blood and tissue
2. Select your desired payment plan
3. Pay a deposit ($99 for cord blood or $130 for cord blood and tissue)
4. Complete medical questionnaire
If you require assistance completing your enrolment please call us on 0800 088 235.
To ensure you receive your collection kit before giving birth, we advise enrolling as early as possible. Cell Care will do everything possible to facilitate last minute registrations.
Following your enrolment, Cell Care will courier a personalised collection kit directly to you. This ensures traceability of your kit from the time it leaves our storage facility until it returns. Generally, we dispatch your kit once you are 34 weeks or later into your pregnancy.
You will need to take your collection kit with you when you give birth. This is to ensure it’s there for the collection process in the birthing suite.
The collection kit contains everything that is required for the best collection to occur. To ensure that the cord blood and tissue is transported back to our facility at the required temperature, our purpose-designed kit contains temperature stabilisers and data loggers.
Collection of cord blood and tissue is performed by your lead maternity carer, obstetrician or midwife at birth.
Cord blood and Cord tissue collection takes place immediately after the birth of the baby once the cord has been clamped and cut. The cord blood is collected into a sterile collection bag. The procedure is painless for both mother and baby, and takes approximately three minutes. The cord tissue (a section of the cord itself) is collected after the delivery of the placenta.
As we are storing a blood product there is a government regulatory requirement to take a sample of the mother’s blood to test for infectious diseases.
Once the collection has taken place, parents contact Cell Care on 0800 088 235 to arrange for a courier to transport the collection kit to our laboratory. The 24-hour transport pick-up number is clearly marked on your collection kit for convenience.
You will receive a text message confirming the arrival of your baby's cord blood and tissue at our facility.
Once we have received your baby’s cord blood and tissue at our laboratory, it is processed immediately. Our scientists process cord blood and tissue 365 days a year.
The cord blood and tissue stem cells are then stored at -196 degrees with a cryo-preservation solution which protects them during the freezing process and ensures safe preservation for the future.
You will receive a follow up call to confirm the storage status of your baby's cord blood and tissue.
Cell Care has released cord blood samples for therapeutic use in both a clinical and approved research setting. The cord blood units we have released to date have been viable for use – this is the ultimate validation of our quality processing and storage methods.
If you need to retrieve your cord blood and tissue cells for a medical treatment or a clinical trial, please contact Cell Care. We will assist you in meeting the necessary regulatory approval requirements.
Cell Care does not charge to release samples.