AABB - American Association of Blood Banks

AABB (formerly known as the “American Association of Blood banks“) is a non-profit international association of organizations and individuals who are involved in activities related to transfusion and transplantation medicine. They were founded in 1947 and are headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland. Originally an “American” association, the AABB is now international in scope and just calls themselves “AABB”.

AABB offers various types of voluntary Accreditation. Most relevent here is their list of AABB Accredited Cord Blood Facilities. Some Cord Blood banks are not AABB accredited for Cord Blood, but are instead listed as AABB Accredited Hematopoietic Progenitor Cell (HPC) Facilities.
Technically, the HPC Accreditation is only for adult sources of Stem Cells, collected from bone marrow or apheresis of peripheral blood, not for cord blood. AABB accredited facilites are inspected every two years. The Accreditation process costs the bank $5600 per year. To some extent, AABB and FACT are competing to be the most prestigious accreditation for cord blood banks. The private cord blood banks are not eligible for FACT accreditation (see the FACT section) and therefore rely on AABB accreditation as their main quality standard in the United States. AABB accredited cord blood banks must perform the following medical tests:


Family: health history


Mother: test for HIV-I&II, Hepatitis B&C, CMV, HTLV-I&II, Syphilis


Cord Blood: test for ABO, Rh, WBC, CD+34, red cell antibodies, bacterial or fungal contamination

It is very important for parents to understand that AABB accreditation does NOT require a specific procedure for processing cord blood. The accreditation is like a quality review of the Standard Operating Procedures (SOP): does the bank have clearly defined procedures, do they follow them, do they maintain accurate records? It does not mandate what those SOP are, and there is a great deal of variation in laboratory practices among accredited banks. AABB has always required reporting of patient outcomes when products are released from an AABB accredited bank. As of 1 May 2005, AABB updated their cord blood accreditation criteria and required all banks to be re-inspected. The revised standards now require that the cord blood should be stored with “integrally attached segments” for testing purposes. Some blood bankers believe that the “integrally attached” requirement forces AABB accredited banks to only store in bags, not vials. The new AABB standards became mandatory in January 2007. Not coincidentally, those cord blood banks which had been using vial storage had switched to bag systems.