HEALTH AND BEAUTY CLOSE-UP-18 August 2008-Cord Blood Registry Trumps Growth Forecast for Second Quarter(C)2008 - CloseUpMedia - newsdesk@closeupmedia.com

Cord Blood Registry (CBR), a global company engaged in umbilical cord blood banking, announced that for the quarter ended June 30, the company

In addition, cash reserves grew 33 percent during the first six months of 2008, an increase of 96 percent year-over-year.

"We are extremely proud of our business growth and ongoing financial strength," said Tom Moore, chief executive officer of CBR. "Even in the face of a slowing economy, CBR continues to outpace the industry in number of client enrollments and resulting revenue. Based on current projections, we anticipate our pace of growth will further accelerate in the second half of the year."

Not a Commodity Business: Strategic Investments Differentiate CBR

Since 1999, CBR has maintained positive cash flow from operations and directed those funds to expand business development and improve operations. In the last four years, CBR has invested more than $20 million in developing incremental innovations, including significant enhancements to technologies to broaden the company's client relationship management system and optimize the company's proprietary system of stem cell collection, processing and storage, called CellAdvantage.

Published data has shown that CBR's CellAdvantage system - which uses the AXP AutoXpress Platform automated processing technology - delivers the highest recovery rate of mononuclear cells, the cells that are critical for a successful transplant. In addition, studies have correlated survival rates and improved outcomes with the number of stem cells used in therapy.

Higher cord blood collections and better cell recovery rates also open the possibility for multiple uses of cord blood stem cells. One area of particular interest is the use of cord blood stem cells in multiple therapies classified as "regenerative medicine," a term that applies to the medical use of stem cells to repair damaged or injured tissue in the body. For more than 40 years, stem cells have been used to regenerate blood and immune cells following the use of chemotherapy to treat life-threatening blood disorders and cancers. Today, research is increasingly focusing on the use of a child's own cord blood stem cells to regenerate other types of tissue in the body, including brain and nerve cells aimed at treating brain damage and spinal cord injury, as well as pancreatic cells, directed to produce insulin for type 1 diabetics.

"Since our inception, CBR has been the industry pioneer and scientific innovator," said Moore. "Our current investment strategy has ensured that we deliver the highest quality cord blood product in the industry. This is important because we expect that medical therapies using stem cells from the umbilical cord will increasingly become the treatment of choice in regenerative medicine."

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