The Ombudsman welcomes the activities of the Ministry of Health and the Directorate of Biomedicine in acting on all the recommendations of the Ombudsman in connection with the storage of stem cells and initiating changes in regulations.
Expert Commission of the Republic for transplantation of cells and tissues emphasized, at the instigation of the Directorate of Biomedicine, the advantages of storing stem cells collected from the umbilical cord blood of the newborn in the national banks, of which the Management Board informed the public.
As stated in the act of the Board, the attitude is formed based on the recommendations of the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies, which gives absolute priority to keeping stem cells to public (national) banks, while any other way of storing and donating stem cells is a personal right of each individual.
The Ministry of Health has submitted an initiative for amending the regulations to allocate part of the resources that parents of newborns pay into the budget of the Republic of Serbia as fee for obtaining approval for the export of cord blood to completion and opening of the public cord blood bank in Serbia at the Institute for Health Protection of Mother and Child of Serbia "Dr. Vukan Čupić".
