This past year has been filled with many obstacles – including another year of Covid-19, record-breaking staff shortages, and supply chain issues.
Yet, despite all these challenges, you still consistently support our mission of saving lives with cord blood donation. People from all over the world – places like Quebec, Italy, and right here in Seattle – received life-saving umbilical cord blood transplantation thanks to each and every one of you. Bloodworks Northwest Cord Blood Donation Program shipped 23 units for transplants in 2022.
Over the past 12 months, volunteer cord blood collectors at five partner hospitals in the Pacific Northwest collected 1,564 cord blood units. Bloodworks’ public cord blood bank carefully evaluated every single unit and selected 89 cord blood donations which met the highest quality standards and were made available for patients in need. As always, we have placed a high priority on increasing racial and ethnic diversity to help ensure there is a suitable match for everyone regardless of background. These carefully selected cord blood units are now listed within the global cord blood registries.
It is the hard truth that not all cord blood donations meet the highest quality standards required for banking, however our bank was able to repurpose more than half for research to find additional therapeutic uses for umbilical cord blood, for a total of 831 utilized in promising scientific research!
Every member at the Cord Blood Donation Program team shares their gratitude for everything you do to support our mission. From educating patients about their cord blood options to the collection itself, from drawing an extra set of tubes of blood to filling out yet another form, no matter what you do to support us, you are saving lives everyday through cord blood donation.
Thank you so much for your dedication to our program. We look forward to saving even more lives in 2023!
Dr. Lin is Medical Director of Bloodworks’ Public Cord Blood Bank.
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