| Before delivery, you will receive our collection kit enabling your physician or midwife to collect the umbilical cord blood. We will provide them with adequate information and training beforehand as appropriate. Soon after birth, the cord blood will be picked up by a certified international courier service and taken to our processing facility immediately thereafter. There it will be checked and prepared for further storage. During examination and preparation, the stem cells are preserved using state-of-the-art technology and their quantity and quality will be determined. They are then divided into two containers and conserved below -196°C in the gas phase of liquid nitrogen at two physically | | separated locations for additional safety. This is known as cryopreservation. Should the cord blood supplied not correspond to the minimum requirements, we will leave it up to the parents to decide not to freeze the sample to avoid any additional cost. For the purposes of security and to assure that your child’s stem cells are assigned individually, they will be identified using unique bar codes. You will receive a corresponding certificate approximately six weeks following birth. This ensures that they will be quickly available when necessary. We will store the stem cells for 21 years. After that time, your child may decide by themselves whether to continue or terminate storage. |
