Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action.
The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances.
This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India.
Photo: Bloomberg
The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained might provide life-saving protection if their children subsequently fell ill.
Some have formed a group to evaluate potential legal action.
Others rejected Cordlife’s proposal to refund the fees for samples deemed to be damaged, saying it was inadequate.
The company has “little regard and no remorse for losing something so precious,” said one parent, who was offered about S$5,000 (US$3,679.3).
Any penalty meted out by Singapore’s Ministry of Health must serve as a warning to all cord blood bank providers, they said.
The agency found that about 2,200 units of cord blood in one holding tank were damaged and an estimated 5,300 units in another tank plus a dry shipper were “non-viable.”
The root cause was insufficient levels of liquid nitrogen in the tanks and inadequate monitoring of the dry shipper, which led to temperatures rising above acceptable levels several times since November 2020.
Cordlife lodged a police report accusing “mostly former” staff members of potential wrongdoing in connection with the defects on Wednesday last week.
Its former chief executive and five board members were arrested earlier this year for alleged breaches of disclosure obligations, regulatory filings said.
The company said it has reviewed its operations in other markets and found no concerns.
Blood extracted from an umbilical cord is full of stem cells, a miraculous feat of biology that could turn into any type of blood cell.
They are particularly useful in the treatment of some cancers, blood diseases such as anemia and an array of immune system disorders. However, any genetic or other defects present when the child is born would also be found in the stem cells, in some cases rendering them useless.
Many medical organizations do not support the use of private cord blood banking.
Commercial organizations charge to extract the cord blood, plus an annual fee to store it. The sample is reserved for the donor and the family.
Meanwhile, public banks take cord blood donations freely, but they are available to anyone in need and are not held in reserve for the donating child.
Neither the American Academy of Pediatrics nor the American Medical Association recommends storing cord blood as a form of “biological insurance.”
Most children never need it and siblings have only a 25 percent shot at a match, making the benefits too rare to justify the cost.
Often, alternative treatments are available, effective and far less expensive, their guidelines say.
Only one in 400 children to one in 200,000 children with stored cord blood would be able to use it throughout their lifetime, a study showed.
Seven units have been retrieved from Cordlife’s Singapore facility since the company was founded in 2001, while tens of thousands of families have used it to store blood samples.
Singapore’s Ministry of Health found similar usage rates among other commercial cord blood banks in the city-state.
The Cordlife situation underscores the difficulty of overseeing the industry and the high cost of investigations when deficits are uncovered.
The ministry’s probe started with a complaint in July last year from a member of the public, after the company cleared a routine inspection in late 2022.
More tests are now needed for other tanks that had misplaced temperature probes, the ministry said.
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