Health committee  This is going to be confusing. When we do a bone marrow transplant for a child or an adult with leukemia, we don't want to use their own cells again. On purpose, we want to use cells from somebody else, because part of the treatment is to get immune therapy. That's the reason why we think we cure leukemias with transplant.

Health committee  Yes, that's an ongoing initiative as part of Canadian Blood Services. I'll circle around to them to submit something to the Clerk of the House to address that. But that is recognized and implemented as an initiative.

Health committee  I'm speaking for myself now, and not necessarily for other cord blood banking operations in Canada. Absolutely any cord blood bank that's developed in Canada needs to be established such that no matter what size of hospital or where it is, you can collect that cord blood unit.

Health committee  It's one baby in ten but with a representative, a proportion; you don't need a high number of cords. There are a lot of babies born in Canada, and you don't need all their cord blood units in the bank. That would be a prohibitive expense. You need high-quality cord blood units, and that translates into units that pass a multitude of potency tests.

Health committee  There is a formal OneMatch proposal that has a full business plan that's been developed in.... I think probably the best way is to get that directly from Canadian Blood Services. There are many ways of going about establishing a Canadian cord blood banking system. That is one approach.

Health committee  The standards that are applied to banking cord blood for use in transplantation from one person to another person, which is the field of blood and marrow transplantation, are very different from the private banking. At this point, we have the young but really well-developed Héma-Québec bank, which is just now at the point of being ready to release cord blood units for transplantation.

Health committee  We're talking about two things at the same time, and that's where it gets a little bit confusing. There are adult donors and cord blood donors for hematopoietic stem cells for use in blood and marrow transplantation. So that's the OneMatch part, only for blood and marrow transplantation indication at this point.

Health committee  This is a major campaign for the OneMatch program at Canadian Blood Services. Their recent donor accruals to their registries have shown a marked increase in younger donors in ethnic minorities. Basically, this needs to be an ongoing process.

Health committee  It's a hard question to answer, because what we need is not so much the raw number of donors, we need to have donors who are available to donate. We prefer to use male donors. We prefer to use young male donors. And we need to have donors who are of a mixed ethnic heritage, or of our ethnic minorities, to increase the odds that a given donor is going to be a good immune match.

Health committee  I think efforts, such as that led by Joy Smith, in bringing out the donor campaigns really help a lot. Helping establish a cord blood bank will help, as will basically continued funding of the national registry, the OneMatch program.

Health committee  Yes. It's a good question, but it's hard to answer that in a sound bite. The issue is that we in the blood and marrow transplant community are networked worldwide with donors for cord blood, and for adult volunteer donors, good Samaritans, who are willing to donate bone marrow for patients in need.

Health committee  I've done this for many years now--so I'm not Dr. “Young” in this--and the issue--

Health committee  The issue here is not, in my past experience, the willingness of parents and obstetricians and hospitals in participating in cord collections. It's very easy to get the word out, and Canadians have big hearts. I don't anticipate problems in that early phase of donation. The difficulty is that in order to bank cord blood units for use in clinical transplantation, we need to meet manufacturing standards, and we need to have the infrastructure support for high-quality banking.

Health committee  I can answer that from the field of blood and marrow transplantation. There is a robust sharing across countries of the best-matched cell products. This includes cord blood. When importing cells, we follow Health Canada regulations that would apply to Canadian products. To date, a vast majority of the cord blood units that have been used for transplantation in Canada have been sourced internationally.

Health committee  I'll take Dr. “Young”.