Share the Science with Kandice Kapinos, Ph.D. from the RAND Corporation

Toward a Sustainable Cord Blood Supply in the United States

Save the Cord Foundation and WellSky are proud to welcome Kandice Kapinos, Ph.D. of the RAND Corporation for our next edition of Share the Science on Wednesday, February 27th, 2019.

​Share the Science is a free webinar series focused on the cord blood industry and the latest research in this field.  As always, we invite both health professionals and the general public to join us for this unique online educational series. Learn more about this exciting educational series here.

Register for this webinar now

In 2005, the US government recognized the need for a federal cord blood donation program. This moment marked a major advancement in stem cell therapies as the government sought to fulfill a need and better standardize the cord blood banking requirements. At the time, the government recognized a need for a centralized public stem cell registry which could provide an ethnically diverse and high-quality source of stem cells easily accessible for patients in need. This was the beginning of the National Cord Blood Inventory (NCBI), operated by the National Marrow Donor Program / Be The Match.

​As we know, cord blood has been used for many years to treat patients suffering from life-threatening diseases including leukemia, lymphoma and sickle cell anemia. In fact, donated cord blood is recognized as a possible treatment for over 80 different diseases. ​Cord blood also holds great promise in the field of regenerative medicine for autism, spinal cord injury, hearing loss and more.

​"The National Cord Blood Inventory (NCBI) program establishes individualized contracts with each public bank that provides cord blood units to the national inventory. As part of their contracts, the public banks receive subsidies every time they store an eligible cord blood unit and register it with the Be The Match® Registry, operated by the National Marrow Donor Program."

​Source:  Kapinos, Kandice A., Brian Briscombe, Tadeja Gracner, Aaron Strong, Christopher Whaley, Emily Hoch, Jakub P. Hlavka, Spencer R. Case, and Peggy G. Chen, Public Cord Blood Banks: Worthy of National Investment. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2017. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB9977.html

Yet, in recent years, the demand for cord blood transplants has decreased namely due to costs and this has led to financial difficulties for many of the public banks that have traditionally contributed to this life-saving program. 
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Fifteen years after the launch of the program, the US Department of Heath and Human Services asked the RAND Corporation to assess the current state of cord blood industry, donation programs and ways to improve the sustainability of the NCBI. In 2017, Kandice Kapinos of RAND Corporation and her colleagues published their report and made recommendations. 
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The key findings of the RAND report were as follows: 

• A national program has significantly increased the publicly available cord blood inventory, but the proportion of stem cell transplants using cord blood has been declining.

• Future demand for cord blood is uncertain, and stagnating demand may force some public cord blood banks to close.

• Cord blood transplantation is not a panacea stem cell treatment, but it is important for certain populations.

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• The RAND research team's calculations found that the value of having a public bank system far outweighs its operational costs.

​Source: Kapinos, Kandice A., Brian Briscombe, Tadeja Gracner, Aaron Strong, Christopher Whaley, Emily Hoch, Jakub P. Hlavka, Spencer R. Case, and Peggy G. Chen, Public Cord Blood Banks: Worthy of National Investment. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2017
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB9977.html

SHARE THE SCIENCE

with
​
Kandice Kapinos, PhD

Economist for the RAND Corporation

"Towards a Sustainable Cord Blood Supply for the United States"

Free webinar. Open to the public
Wednesday, February 27th, 2019 at 11am Central Time

Register here for Share the Science with Kandice Kapinos (RAND Corporation)

About the Speaker

Kandice Kapinos is a health and labor economist at the RAND Corporation. Her research broadly focuses on health economics, health services research and the economics of prevention, particularly for vulnerable populations. She is currently leading a study on access to care in California Workers’ Compensation system and contributing to two studies on telehealth and one on disability among the self-employed. Recently she has completed several child and maternal health studies, including studies of peer and environmental effects in adolescent obesity and pregnancy; effects of perinatal maternal weight trajectories on maternal and child health outcomes, the effects of Cesarean deliveries on maternal health, and the cord blood industry. She also has extensive experience with health care reform and health policy evaluation studies across a wide range of health topics. Much of this work has been focused in the area of policies aimed at improving preventive health utilization She has advanced applied econometric and survey methodological skills.

She previously worked at the University of Michigan, the US Census Bureau and Abt Associates. She completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Center for Chronic Disease Outcomes Research at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center, a VA Health Services Research and Development (HSR&D) Center of Excellence. Kapinos received her Ph.D. in labor economics/human resources from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.         

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We wish to thank Kandice Kapinos for volunteering her time to speak on
Share the Science and sharing her valuable insight on the cord blood industry.
We also wish to thank our generous sponsor and partner for this event,
WellSky Health, who continue to support cord blood
education through our “Share the Science” series.