A successful transplant requires a nearly identical donor match. Sadly, 60,000 people die each year without ever finding a donor. In 1998, Bert Lubin, MD, president of CHORI, sought to circumvent this problem by establishing the only not-for-profit sibling-donor cord blood program in the world.

The Sibling Connection combines the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute (CHORI) and the national Sibling Donor Cord Blood Program with the high quality cord blood processing services conducted by ViaCord. The sibling cord blood banking program offers cord blood preservation at no cost to expectant parents who have a child that may be in need of an umbilical cord blood stem cell transplantation. CHORI and ViaCord’s experience together includes more than 100 family-related cord blood stem cells units that have been released for transplantation.