Kodiak Island, Alaska, is just 4.8 square miles with a population of about 6,000. It’s also home to one of CBR’s newest clients. On Saturday, July 14, thanks to CBR employees going to great lengths, a cord blood collection traveled a huge distance to be stored in our state-of-the-art lab in Tucson, Ariz. Read on to see how it all came together.

Saturday, when many offices and labs are closed, CBR’s laboratory was bustling – cord blood and tissue samples were being received, processed and stored. Nick Sutton was staffing the Receiving and Records department when he got a call: A family in Alaska had just given birth and needed to have their CBR CellAdvantage® Collection Kit picked up.   

Ordinarily, this isn’t a problem but, this time, the normal courier had a family emergency that had taken him away from Kodiak Island and he would not be back until Monday at the earliest. In addition, because it was Saturday night, Fedex was closed and wouldn’t be able to pick up the kit until Monday.

Although CBR’s collection kit is designed to maintain cell viability over long periods, we always work to get collections picked up and into storage as quickly as possible – usually within 24 hours of birth. So, for this special case, Nick talked with his manager about how we could go above and beyond to make sure this collection didn’t have to wait. We worked with our medical courier to charter a flight from Anchorage to Kodiak Island, have the kit collected and fly it back to Anchorage for the next flight to “the mainland,” bound for Tucson. Although this cost CBR more in shipping, we know it was worth it. The sample made it safely and was processed and stored quickly.

Special thanks to Nick and that weekend’s manager Laura Tank for making this incredible journey possible. They are a great example of how CBR goes the distance for its client families.