2025 Biotherapies Pavilion Participant Spotlight: Save the Cord Foundation

AABB interviewed Charis Ober, founder and executive director at Save The Cord Foundation, a participating organization in the Biotherapies Pavilion at the 2025 AABB Annual Meeting. Read the interview below to learn more about the Save The Cord Foundation team.

Tell us a bit about yourself. What is your name? Where are you from? What is your role at Save The Cord and how long have you been part of the team?

My name is Charis Ober and I am the Founder/Executive Director of Save the Cord Foundation, a 501c3 nonprofit organization focused on advancing cord blood education around the world.

What about Save The Cord - when was it founded? What products and services do you provide? What is your mission and how many people work there?

I started Save the Cord Foundation almost 20 years ago, after learning about cord blood preservation during a visit to a local cord blood bank at the time. I was fascinated by the science and the fact that the umbilical cord and tissue, something that was normally thrown away at birth, could be used to save someone's life. Yet, no one in my community knew about this. That's when I realized that we were in a unique position to help spread the word, to educate. We set up the Foundation and, while the team has always remained relatively small, we are proud to say that our reach has grown significantly in recent years - thanks to our flagship programs like "Share the Science," "World Cord Blood Day," and the recently launched program for high school / university students, "Cord Blood in the Classroom." We focus exclusively on advancing cord blood education. We do not own or operate any cord blood banks, but we are proud to be the official education partner for the Arizona Public Cord Blood Program, a state-run public cord blood donation program.

What are your most important goals as a company for this year and next? What are you most excited to see develop?

We are very proud of our newest program, "Cord Blood in the Classroom," launched last year. In a nutshell, this is a free education program designed for high school and university students. We have years of experience making presentations in high schools in Arizona and we wanted a way to expand this educational outreach nationally, or even globally. Our team worked with various cord blood experts, as well as secondary teachers, to design an easy-to-use, modular program that any teacher could use, even without prior knowledge of cord blood. For this program, we put a focus on cord blood careers and patient testimonials. This is what the students and teachers told us they needed, and it works! Now, we are working on the next version of this program, tailoring it to the nursing community. This time, we have a team of nurses and education experts combining expertise to build this out, and we hope to launch that sometime in the next year. In the meantime, we are focused on World Cord Blood Day 2025, which we host and organize. We hope your community will join us for that on Nov. 17. As always, it's free and our virtual conference is open to everyone.