Thanks to cold storage, we can extend the useful life of any thing.   If there were no cold storage technology, we would be wasting astronomical quantity of food stuff leading to starvation and death, in spite of surplus production.   As anything with life when left to nature will sooner or later will start decaying at environmental temperature.    

In medical field, an organ like liver when donated has to be transplanted within a maximum of 24 hours of death.  Heart has to be transplanted within 6 hours of removal.  Donated Eye has to reach eye bank within 12 hours of death for corneal transplant.  The whole organs from our body can not be cold-stored for long periods with present technology.

But then is it not unbelievable that our germ cells like sperm and eggs and early stage embryos can be frozen-stored almost forever!!!  In Israel, a woman gave birth to twin babies after 12 years of frozen storage of embryos.   In UK, a woman gave birth to a baby whose husband’s sperms were frozen-stored 17 years back.  

We in Baheti Hospital had a successful ongoing pregnancy (   weeks) after the transfer of embryos which were frozen stored about 6 years back.  This woman’s living baby who is 6 years old was also born through IVF from the same batch of embryos and the 6 year old girl and the child to be born are contemporaries but with an age gap of 6 years!!!

After hearing all this, people wonder, if it would be possible to preserve a snippet of ourselves for future use whenever we need our cells desperately for repair and regeneration of our body parts/blood cells.   Here is the answer for such people.  That is the so-called “Stem Cells” – stem cells are the progenitor cells for most of our blood cells.   Embryonic Stem Cells are the progenitors of almost all the cells in our body.   We all know that we originated from a single cell of embryo.    Placenta along with umbilical cord is invariably discarded after baby’s birth as bio-medical waste.  It has been discovered that the umbilical cord is a rich source of Stem Cells and can be successfully used for treatment of some incurable diseases of the baby like Thalassemia, Sickle Cell anaemia, Leukaemia, Fanconi’s anaemia. The added advantage is that because these cells are small they can be cryo-preserved for decades.    Cord Cell Banking has developed into a privately funded enterprise for helping people to preserve their babies cord cells.   The advantage of cord stem cells over that of adult stem cells (collected from our bone marrow) is that cord cells are in a sense innocent, which means they do not mount graft-host rejection phenomenon.   Hence, cord blood cells can be used for anybody for some disorders.   This is not possible with adult stem cells which needs tissue matching with recipient and has to be painfully extracted from bone-marrow after drilling through the hip-bone.   Promising research is ongoing into using cord blood stem cells to treat diseases like diabetes, alzeimer’s and muscular dystrophy

Recently we preserved our twin ICSI baby’s umbilical cord stem cells for potential future of the babies.  We believe that all prospective parents should be aware of this new technology which offers a kind of bio-insurance or a life-saving elixir in the hour of crisis in their children’s life even decades after his/her birth.   Parents should also find out about any family history of diseases that may increase the risk for other family members.  For such patients, private cord cell banks may offer an opportunity to store the potential cure of these diseases.