Anchoring hopes in a regime of truth. The legitimizing use of cord blood-derived products in Italy

Abstract

Public Umbilical Cord Blood (UCB) banking is defined by the dominant bioethics and biomedical literature as working in a regime of valuation that connects the social value of solidarity and the clinical value of collected quality UCB. Adopting the notion of registers of valuing (Heuts, F., and A. Mol. 2013. “What Is a Good Tomato? A Case of Valuing in Practice.” Valuation Studies 1 (2): 125–146), this paper challenges the aforementioned view. By exploring the Italian public system of UCB banking, it discusses disputes around the organization of the logistic of UCB donation, inspired by divergent registers of valuing enacted by involved actors. This paper focuses on the Italian public UCB banks’ involvement in experimental clinical protocols, using cells derived from UCB. It demonstrates how these experimental applications are deployed by Italian UCB bank practitioners to legitimize their work and to advance claims of jurisdictional monopoly over UCB banking and donation. It concludes that concrete arrangements of UCB banking are the outcome of negotiations among involved actors.

Keywords:

• umbilical cord blood
• blood-products
• registers of valuing
• experimental protocols

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Christine Hauskeller for her invaluable supervision during my MSC fellowship, which led to this publication. I also thank Niccolò Tempini, Matteo Santus and Massimiano Bucchi for their comments on a draft version of this article. Finally, I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers who offered me well-received suggestions to improve this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Lorenzo Beltrame http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7235-8683

Additional information

Funding

This research has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Scheme, grant agreement No. 657361-REGUCB.