A bone and marrow transplant specialist at a Toronto children's hospital says for every three successful transplants performed, one patient on the waiting list dies for lack of an appropriate match — a problem that could be helped if Canada had a national cord blood bank.

"Fifty or more people each year we're losing because we can't find a donor," said Dr. John Doyle, who heads the Bone and Marrow Transplant Program at the Hospital for Sick Children.

The increasing number of non-Caucasian patients risk being unable to find a match within the pool of largely Caucasian donors, Doyle told CBC News, underscoring the need for a national public bank to store cord blood.

Cord blood is found inside the umbilical cord and can be used to harvest stem cells, which Doyle said have the ability to "forgive" some of the typing differences between donors and receivers that marrow cells cannot.

"So when we're looking at a child of mixed heritage … the ability to accept a mismatch becomes important, and in that setting cord blood becomes a donor source."

Beverly Campbell of Canadian Blood Services said plans are underway to establish a national public cord blood bank as early as next year. First, the agency must present a business case to its funders, the provincial and territorial governments.

She estimates it could cost almost $5 million to set up and an additional $2 million each year to run.

Such a bank, Doyle said, must find also find a way of bringing in more ethnically diverse donors if it hopes to serve the needs of Canada's multicultural patients.

Although a number of private blood banks exist in Toronto and across the country, Doyle said they won't help with these kinds of patients.

Outside of Montreal, Toronto and Edmonton, most cord blood collection in the country is done commercially. "We very much need a publicly driven system where people are giving cord blood to be used by anyone, in any circumstance," he said.

Because Canada lacks a national, taxpayer-supported cord blood bank, most cord blood used for transplants here comes from foreign countries.