Thank you very much, Madam Chair and committee. I'll be brief.
I'm speaking as a pediatric blood and marrow transplant physician who uses cord blood as the primary choice of stem cells for transplant in children who do not have a donor in the family, and also as a person who's been active in the field of cord blood banking and regulation for over 15 years, having started both the St. Louis Cord Blood Bank and the Texas Cord Blood Bank, and being active in the Foundation for the Accreditation of Cellular Therapy.
My previous colleagues have made a very eloquent case for the need for a cord blood banking system in Canada. The points I'd like to accentuate at this time are as follows.
One, a cord blood bank in Canada needs to be known for its quality. There are very strict international regulatory standards that have been established, and it's critical that we be known as a bank with very high standards.
Second, just to be very direct, size matters. When we're doing a transplant, we need to have a large cord blood unit, meaning units that have the most cells possible contained in them. What that means in banking operations is that you need to develop a collection network and system that allows you to bank only the largest of the cord blood units.
The third point is that it is critical to have a variety of immune types--and you can put in the word “ethnicity”, since immune type and ethnicity go together. Where cord blood makes a difference in clinical practice is with our patients who are of mixed racial heritage or of ethnic minorities. With the establishment of a bank, we need to unabashedly target these populations for the bank. This means our first-generation Canadians, our multi-ethnic Canadians, and ethnic minorities. This is going to need a very creative network of cord blood collection.
We have a lot of the building blocks in place for an excellent cord blood collection banking system in Canada. We've heard from CBS. It has set up a tremendous network system for management of donors, putting transplant centres across the world together with donors across the world. There's no need to reinvent the wheel in that department. We have Héma-Québec, which has done a tremendous job in setting up a solid cord blood bank, as have colleagues in Alberta.
What we need are the funds to help pull all this together and take the banking operations up to the next level so that we can move to the forefront on the world stage. I've inspected banks around the world. Unfortunately, I have never had the privilege of inspecting a Canadian cord blood bank as part of the international accreditations, because we're just not quite there yet.
With those words, I'll submit my written document. I don't want to waste everyone's time by repeating a lot of the similar statements.
Thank you for the time.