I'll be speaking, Madam Chair. Thank you very much.
Good morning, members of the committee. I'm Graham Sher, the chief executive officer of Canadian Blood Services, which is the organization responsible for managing the blood system in all provinces and territories of Canada, except for the province of Quebec. We are also responsible for managing, in addition to the blood program, the plasma program and, of particular relevance to today's committee, the OneMatch stem cell and marrow network.
I'd like to thank you, in particular, Madam Chair, for the invitation to attend today's committee and for your very strong personal interest in the topic of stem cell transplantation. I'm pleased to be able to talk to the committee this morning about stem cell donation in Canada, and specifically about the probability and possibility of creating a national public umbilical cord blood bank for the country.
As many of you in this committee know, stem cell transplants are used to treat patients who have certain cancers or life-threatening immune disorders and some metabolic and other genetic disorders. Unfortunately, only about one-quarter, 25%, of patients actually have a match within their own family, and therefore, every year, hundreds of Canadians require stem cell transplants and have to depend on the program, OneMatch, to find them a suitable donor.
To that end, OneMatch recruits and maintains a registry of prospective Canadian stem cell donors. When a patient requires a stem cell transplant, at the request of their physician, they search the OneMatch registry to identify potential matching donors. Because OneMatch is a member with accredited international organizations, we are able to search over 14 million donors worldwide, from 63 other registries in 44 countries, and we're able to search 44 cord blood banks in 26 countries worldwide, in addition to our own registry in Canada.
OneMatch's role is to ensure that the volunteer donors are healthy and able to donate, and then we organize the collection and the delivery of stem cells in Canada and around the world when a suitable match is found between a Canadian patient and a donor. In addition, OneMatch actually serves the purpose of enabling searches for international patients from our Canadian registry, making this a truly international system.
However, finding a match for a patient in need is often very challenging because of how closely the donor stem cells have to match the tissue type of the patient. It often requires what is called an HLA, human leukocyte antigen, match and ideally you want a 10-point match. HLAs are the genetic markers that are used to find the best stem cell donor for a particular patient. This requirement is really at the heart of what we're talking about here today.
Canada is one of the few G-20 countries without a national cord blood bank. An ethnically diverse, national public cord blood bank is needed in Canada. Having this important resource in place for Canadians would offer several benefits: it would save more Canadian lives; it would allow for greater matching possibilities because cord blood does not always require the rigorous match that other stem cells such as bone marrow and blood stem cells may require; it causes fewer complications to do transplants from cord blood, particularly a complication known as graft versus host disease; and it helps meet the rapidly growing demand for cord blood stem cells in general.
In fact, consistent with worldwide trends, OneMatch continues to see a significant shift in demand for products away from bone marrow and peripheral blood stem cells toward patients and physicians, particularly physicians, requesting cord blood stem cells.
In addition, a Canadian cord blood bank would better represent the unique ethnic diversity that makes up this country and would decrease the risks and costs associated with the 100% reliance on international sources for cord blood stem cells.
As I mentioned earlier, Canadian Blood Services is the organization that operates the national blood system across this country, except in Quebec. In recognition of CBS's established quality and regulatory infrastructure, our accredited and licensed testing laboratories, our experience in donor recruitment in stem cell processing, and the fact that we are national in scope and accountable to the provinces and the public, and we have credibility with links to Canadian and international stem cell communities, with all of those factors in mind, the provincial and territorial ministers of health responsible for the delivery of health services asked Canadian Blood Services to investigate the possibility of a national cord blood bank for Canada. In response to this request, we prepared and submitted the results of a study, including recommendations for the establishment of a national public cord blood bank in Canada. Following discussions and further requests from the ministers, we submitted to them a detailed business plan for this cord blood bank.
After extensive public consultation across the country to discuss the issues and share knowledge, key learnings, and best practices, our plan was submitted to the provinces and territories outlining a comprehensive national model, including two accredited stem cell laboratories and a collection network right across the country. It would be managed by Canadian Blood Services through our national stem cell program, OneMatch. We would be an active contributor to the global stem cell community, joining those other 44 cord blood banks I mentioned earlier and being able to contribute to the 450,000 cord blood units available worldwide today.
As mentioned earlier, this plan leverages Canadian Blood Services' established infrastructure and foundation in support of a national public cord blood bank. To be more specific, our organization already manages the OneMatch network, which currently searches matches and acquires cord blood for patients in this country. We have experience in the collection, processing, and storage of stem cells. We are experienced at meeting regulatory requirements, including the Foundation for Accreditation of Cellular Therapies, which is an international accreditation standard that we already have in our laboratories.
We have established partnerships with hospitals across this country. We are successful in our blood program in recruiting ethnically diverse donors, and we have extensive experience in understanding stem cell requirements of physicians. We have the infrastructure and the expertise necessary to support the creation and maintenance of quality and regulatory standards, privacy, medical, scientific, information technology, and the legal and financial resources to support a public cord blood bank.
Further, we believe that a centralized national model for cord blood banks in Canada would best be able to meet the needs of Canadian patients by providing the diverse tissue type--HLA type--searchable, accredited, cord blood bank that reflects the ethnic diversity of Canada. It would be used not only by physicians and patients in this country, but by physicians and patients internationally.
One of the primary goals stated in our plan for the national public cord blood bank is to collect and store a diverse inventory to serve the needs of the entire Canadian population, in particular and including the aboriginal population in Canada. To achieve this, our recommended national model includes collection sites in the ethnically diverse provinces and cities in Canada. We would apply the key learnings from the successful recruitment campaigns we already have in OneMatch to help recruit these ethnic donors.
On the size of the bank, in our model we are proposing a bank of 20,000 cord blood units, based on the estimates of Canadian subject matter experts who have suggested that a bank in this country needs to range somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 units. Our plan focuses on continued reliance on the medical and scientific expertise within the Canadian stem cell transplant and research community.
In June 2009, this plan for the 20,000 cord blood bank samples was unanimously approved by the ministers of health in all the provinces and territories, excluding Quebec, pending funding approval.