Umbilical cords are usually discarded when a baby is born, but from this week parents are being offered the chance to store this precious source of stem cells as a form of future health insurance for their children.

Every parent wants to protect their child from illness and this simple move can be crucial to treat a number of conditions such as diabetes, multiple sclerosis, lymphoma, leukaemia, Alzheimer’s and spinal cord injuries.

Renald Blundell, one of the island’s top geneticists, who runs Future Cells Ltd based in St Anne’s Clinic, told The Sunday Times this service was a giant stride on the company’s decision to start offering parents the possibility of storing the multi-potent, cell-rich blood from the umbilical cord two years ago.

Like any insurance, it comes at a cost – €2,350 to store both the cord that is rich in mesenchymal stem cells and its blood – but it gives peace of mind in an ever-advancing science of cell-based therapies to treat disease.

“This is a unique opportunity to protect these cells which will not be available in the later stages of our lives. It gets round the problem of rejecting donor cells, since the chances of finding cell compatibility as adults are very low,” Dr Blundell said.

The procedure is simple. Before giving birth, the mother is given a kit so that the gynaecologist or doctor can store about six to 10 centimetres of the umbilical cord and its blood. It is recommended both are stored.

These will be couriered within 24 hours to Brussels by Future Cells, the only local representative of Europe’s leading private stem cell bank Cyro-Save, where they will be stored for 20 years and kept frozen at -196C in the gas phase of nitrogen. The cells will be purified and analysed for any viruses before being stored.

This Dutch holding company has more than 140,000 samples from across Europe stored, with about 1,000 cord blood kits from Maltese. It has branches in 36 countries and state-of-the-art laboratories in Belgium, Germany and the United Arab Emirates.

Dr Blundell is one of these scientists and one of the few worldwide to experiment on, and discover the advantages of storing the umbilical cord when his daughter Cayleen was born in September 2007.

He attempted to produce cells that mimicked heart cells on an experimental basis and it worked. In the future, this science can be used instead of major heart surgery. When the heart valve is not functioning properly, a catheter can be inserted into the veins and the cells injected directly into the heart.

Stem cell research is a fascinating science where a cell has the ability to self-replicate for indefinite periods, serving as a sort of repair system for the body.

Under the right conditions, or given the proper signals, stem cells can give rise to the many different cell types that make up an organism. In other words, stem cells have the potential to develop into mature cells that have characteristic shapes and specialised functions, such as heart cells, skin cells, pancreatic cells, blood cells and lung cells, among others.

For example, in the case of diabetes, the stem cells can be injected through a small incision into the pancreas where they stick and replace dead or injured cells to start the healing process the body was unable to do on its own.

For adult patients who did not have the good luck of utilising this ground-breaking research, cells are taken from the bone marrow, but since these would have already been developed and specialised, they are mostly used in neurological disorders and spinal cord injuries.

What are stem cells?

• Stem cells are found in large numbers in the placenta and umbilical cord.

• A 50ml blood sample from an umbilical cord contains several million stem cells.

• They form the basis of the body’s blood and immune systems, but can grow into any cells for any part of the human body, including muscle, organs, nerves, skin, or bone.

• They can be frozen for subsequent use for treatment of the cell donors themselves, which basically means patients’ own tissue is transplanted back into them and won’t be rejected as foreign by the immune system.

• Stem cells from umbilical cord blood have a number of advantages: they are more vital, easy to remove, and the removal is not subject to ethical objections.

• The tissue between the skin and the blood cells in the umbilical cord is called Wharton jelly and is one of the human body’s richest sources of a stem cell known as mesenchymal stem cells (MSC).

• MSC is useful for regenerating tissue after damage. It has been used for treatment of patients with heart problems, bowel disease, bone, cartilage, ulcers and other clinical interventions.

• It is used in combination with umbilical cord blood as dual therapy to reduce immune system complications.