Canadian Blood Services plans to ask later this month for $5 million from provincial and territorial governments to start a national public umbilical cord blood bank.

Two dozen experts who met on the issue over the weekend in Ottawa have agreed there are not enough donors to meet the growing demand for regenerative stem cells in Canada.

"There are simply not enough marrow or cord donors in Canada at this time," Dr. Stephen Couban of the Canadian Bone Marrow Transplant Group said after the two-day meeting.

"The registries, both here and around the world, simply don't reflect the ethnic diversity that we see in Canada today.

Canada is in a unique position to tap into a diverse and multicultural population for umbilical cord blood capable of providing stem cells to cure diseases such as cancer, immune disorders, metabolic disorders and bone marrow failure disorders, Couban said.

However, Canada is "lagging behind" many countries simply because it does not have a public cord bank, he added.

There are fewer than a dozen private cord blood banks in Canada — in Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia — but the cost of depositing cord blood starts with an average initial fee of about $1,000, plus $120 or more a year to keep it viable in the deep-freeze of liquid nitrogen.

Currently, only two public banks exist in Canada: the Alberta Cord Blood Bank, funded in part by its private affiliate, the Canadian Cord Blood Registry, and one operated by HEMA Quebec, the province's equivalent of the Canadian Blood Services.

Registries offer potential match

Both are enrolled with international cord blood registries, allowing Canadians in need of stem cells to seek a match with donors from other countries and vice versa.

The blood agency's CEO, Dr. Graham Sher, told a news conference Sunday a national cord bank would need 10,000 samples and about $2.5 million a year to operate.

The weekend meeting was the last stage in a consultation process Canadian Blood Services undertook after deputy health ministers from the provinces and territories asked it to draw up a business plan for a national public bank. Sher plans to take the proposal to them late this month.

"We do anticipate it's going to take several years to grow a large enough inventory [of samples]," he said. "We want to get started."

Approval would enable the agency to begin collecting targeted samples designed to fill the ethnically diverse tissue types that now exist in Canada.

"It's not really 'open your doors and come one, come all,"' Sher said. "That doesn't necessarily allow you to, in the most effective manner possible, recruit from those communities that best reflect the fabric of Canada today."

Recipients in greatest need

Canadians who donate their child's cord blood to a public bank give up rights over its use. It will go to a recipient in greatest need and with the best tissue match, in much the same way that donors and recipients for bone marrow transplants are chosen.

Cord blood stem cells can do now what bone marrow transplants have traditionally done — rebuild the blood and immune systems of a child, and increasingly of adults, whose bone marrow has been damaged or destroyed from treating cancers such as leukemia or from immune system-related disorders.

But because the seeds of leukemia, for instance, are likely present in the child's cord blood at birth, using their own stem cells drawn from private banks to produce new oxygen-carrying red cells, infection-fighting white cells and platelets could only set them up for recurrence of the disease down the road.

Public banks are strictly for stem cell transplantation among unrelated people, therefore minimizing the risk of transplanting already bad cells. Healthy stem cells transplanted from other donors would recognize cancer cells as foreign and try to eradicate them.