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Choosing a Cord Blood Bank
Important considerations about cord blood banks:

Look for a bank that processes and stores only stem cells in dedicated facilities.
Some banks may store other human and nonhuman tissue. Sperm banks, blood banks, and hospitals perform a variety of processes for numerous applications, but most don’t have dedicated facilities, equipment, or staff. That increases potential for cross-contamination or material error and may mean that the processing applied to your stem cells is based on the cost-effectiveness of materials, rather than procedures that will provide the highest yield of stem cells.

Make certain the bank performs “controlled-rate” freezing.
Controlled-rate freezing is performed with computerized equipment that lowers the temperature of the sample as safely as possible. This means that the temperature of your stem cell sample is slowly lowered over a period of hours, past the point of freezing, until it is ready to be put into liquid nitrogen for long-term storage. Rapid freezing or simply putting a sample into liquid nitrogen may damage the cells.

Choose a bank that has published data on their collection and processing methods.
This can help validate the integrity of the bank. Published data validates the process because the data must be carefully reviewed by impartial scientific and medical peers and verified for accuracy prior to being published.