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New York Blood Center (NYBC)

New York Blood Center (NYBC) is a nonprofit community blood center and research institution based in New York City. NYBC, along with its partner organizations Community Blood Center of Kansas City, Mo. (CBC), and Innovative Blood Resources (IBR), based St. Paul, MN, provide blood products and services to more than 325 hospitals in the Northeast and Midwestern United States. Thousands of units of blood products are collected each day and distributed to more than 40 million people in New York, New Jersey, parts of Connecticut and Pennsylvania, along with the Kansas City metropolitan area, Minnesota and Nebraska. NYBC’s mission is to “serve the 20 million people in the New York metropolitan area—and more broadly, our nation and our world—by alleviating human suffering and preserving human life.” NYBC’s research has led to breakthroughs in the treatment of conditions like Hepatitis, AIDS, SARS, and MERS viruses, and neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. NYBC joined forces with CBC in 2014, and announced its combination with IBR in 2016.

History

NYBC was established in 1964 by Dr. Aaron Kellner, with the help of Lindsley F. Kimball. For 25 years, first as executive director and then as president, Dr. Kellner led the center as it grew to be the nation's largest blood bank. He retired in 1989. Dr. Kellner was succeeded by Dr. John Adamson in 1989, and Dr. Robert L. Jones in 1998. Dr. Christopher Hillyer became the fourth President and CEO of New York Blood Center in 2008. In February 2016, NYBC and CBC announced the creation of the Kansas City-based National Center for Blood Group Genomics. The center will specialize in providing “precise-matched” blood products to avoid complications, properly screen patients for various transfusion treatments, and improve the overall practice and safety of transfusion medicine.

Partnerships

NYBC is a partner of Be The Match, the National Marrow Donor Program, which helps match patients battling blood cancers, immune deficiencies, and other diseases with bone marrow and/or stem cell donors. NYBC has added more than 240,000 donors to its registry and assisted more than 1,400 people make their donation since 1989. Both the New York Police Department and the New York Fire Department are longtime partners of NYBC. The NYPD is the largest single organization to host blood drives with NYBC. In 2015, the NYPD helped NYBC collect about 10% (or 13,000 pints) of its total donations that year. FDNY members make up the largest single group on NYBC’s bone marrow registry – more than 8,000 FDNY members are on the donor list. To date, a total of 179 FDNY members have given these gifts to patients – in some cases more than once – accounting for more than 10% of all donors from New York Blood Center. According to FDNY officials, probationary firefighters are encouraged during their Fire Academy training to sign up for the registry, as part of a partnership with the New York Blood Center. After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the New York Blood Center examined its list of donors and discovered that 143 firefighters who died that day had signed up to be marrow donors, most of them while still in training as rookies. The center notified the families, and set aside their blood samples; over the years, it has given the small vials of blood to some relatives. Some put the vials in their freezers at home. Some bury them at funerals, as with Firefighter Michael Paul Ragusa in 2003. Mrs. Stack and her sons visited the blood center last year. The center located Chief Stack’s blood in a storage facility in Minnesota.

National Cord Blood Program

NYBC is home to the National Cord Blood Program at the Howard P. Milstein National Cord Blood Center, is the world’s oldest public cord blood bank named after NYBC chairman Howard Milstein. The National Cord Blood Program provides cord blood stem cell transplants to patients who have not found a compatible bone marrow match. It was founded in 1992, and has since banked more than 60,000 cord blood units, making it one of the largest public cord blood banks in the world. According to Pablo Rubinstein, director of the New York Blood Center’s National Cord Blood Program, 5,000 to 6,000 cord blood transplants have been performed since 1988. A two year old child from Florida is free of signs of juvenile myelomonocytic leukemia (JMML), a very rare form of pediatric leukemia, seventeen months after receiving a transplant with cord blood from the National Cord Blood Program (NCBP) of the New York Blood Center's Howard P. Milstein National Cord Blood Center.

HEMACORD® (HPC, Cord Blood)

In 2011, NYBC became the first public cord blood bank in the world to receive NetCord-FACT accreditation (2003) and licensure of one of its stem cell products—HEMACORD™ (hematopoietic progenitor cells, cord blood). HEMACORD is indicated for use in hematopoietic stem cell transplantation procedures in patients with disorders affecting the hematopoietic (blood forming) system. For example, cord blood transplants have been used to treat patients with certain blood cancers and some inherited metabolic and immune system disorders. In 2014, HEMACORD® received the prestigious Prix Galien USA Award for best biotechnology product

Lindsley F. Kimball Research Institute and Research Initiatives

Establshed in 1964, the Lindsley F. Kimball Research Institute (LFKRI) is the research branch of New York Blood Center. LFKRI's research efforts have paved the way for new blood-related products, techniques and therapies. The Institute's research has resulted in the following patents and licenses

• In the late 1970s, NYBC pioneered the use of bar-coding in blood banking operations, now standard throughout the world in reducing possibility of human error and speeding blood product processing.

• In 1978, NYBC licensed the first low cost HBV (Hepatitis B) vaccine, a technology developed by Dr. Alfred Prince and the staff of the Laboratory of Virology. Over 75 million low cost doses produced for public sector immunization prevent an estimated 1 million cases of liver cancer.

• In 1985, NYBC’s Solvent Detergent Viral Inactivation – a process to inactivate the viruses of hepatitis B, hepatitis non-A and HIV in plasma – is approved by the FDA in manufacturing plasma based products at Melville Biologics NYBCs the Blood Derivatives program.

• In 1990, FDA approved a license for NYBC's patented process to inactivate viruses in Factor VIII products for hemophilia patients (SD) solvent detergent treated factor VIII.

• In a landmark 1998 paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Pablo Rubinstein and colleagues documented the world’s largest clinical experience of outcomes among patients using placental cord blood for stem cells as compared to bone marrow.

• In 2003, NYBC’s Complement Biology Research Program received a grant from NIH and the American Heart Association to study the immune response that seeks to destroy mismatched transfused blood.

• In 2006, Rona S. Weinberg, PhD, of NYBC’s Stem Cell Laboratory established the Myeloproliferative Disorders Research Consortium (MPD-RC) tissue bank at NYBC. The bank provides researchers with access to biologic samples linked to clinical data to support research.

• In 2008, NYBC’s Laboratory of Parasitology, under Sara Lustigman, PhD, reported important progress in identifying an agent to prevent one of the most common malaria-causing parasites from binding to red cells.

• In 2012, working with researchers from Leiden University, Andromachi Scaradavou, MD, of NYBC’s Milstein National Cord Blood Program showed how matching non-inherited maternal antigens (NIMA) with mismatched donor leucocyte antigens might improve the outcome of cord blood transplants.

• In 2013, Sara Lustigman, PhD from the Laboratory of Molecular Parasitology received an NIH grant for development of an Antigen-sparing Adjuvant for Vaccines to fight new influenza strains, HIV, SARS, West Nile and the increased threat of bioterrorism.

• Also in 2013, Asim Debnath, PhD of LFKRI’s Laboratory of Molecular Modeling and Drug Design used structure-based design to modify a cell impermeable linear peptide to a cell penetrating peptide (CPP) which can inhibit HIV-1 in cell cultures.