How Cord Bloods Transplant Actually Works

This article show to us how cord bloods transplant and what was the results, Dr. Colleen Delaney explain that below.

A cord blood transplant is a transplant that uses umbilical cord blood as its source of blood-forming stem cells for the transplant. So essentially it's exactly the same thing as a bone marrow transplant. It's just that the source of those blood-forming stem cells come from umbilical cord as opposed to coming from an adult's volunteer donor. 

We can find Cord Blood donors for 99% of those patients who can otherwise find a donor, that blood is more immunologically naive mean by that is it's been protected in the mom. We don't have to match that cord blood donor as strictly as we would an adult donor. And so that opens up a whole new arena for patients together transplants. And because they don't have to be matched we can find Cord Blood donors for essentially everyone who needs a transplant.

The immune system that is in there is not as strong. It hasn't had to fight anything. It's uneducated. So, Mt immune system is very strong and can fight any Invaders bacteria viruses things that come into my body. But when you take a cord blood unit the T cells that are part of that cord blood unit are pretty much happy to be wherever they're not so aggressively attacking something. They don't know they're more accepting. So the other beauty of Cord Blood the other real Advantage is that these are frozen bags of blood they are collected as I said without any risk to the infant or the mom. 

First Cord Blood transplant was performed in 1988. It was done actually in France. The patient was a US citizen. He was a young boy who had a problem called fanconi anemia when his sibling was born. They collected that cord blood with the idea that they could perform a transplant on this child. They flew the child to France to Paris as well as that Frozen Cord Blood unit and he went to France because there was a woman there Elian Gluckman who had been performing bone marrow. Plants for fanconi anemia she was sort of the expert at that time. So they performed the transplant there and that young child who is now an adult is doing fine has a family of his own and that was really the proof of principle the proof of concept that you could take a cord blood unit use that as your source of stem cells. Not the bone marrow not peripheral blood but that that medical waste right the blood that is collected from the cord and the placenta Infuse that as your source of stem cells and it can work long-term. 

So the major risks of a cord blood transplant are related to the fact that the number of cells contained within that cord blood unit are limited. So a patient who gets a cord blood transplant for example will get about one-tenth the number of stem cells as someone who gets a bone marrow or peripheral blood stem cell transplant. Essentially what that means is that the first few weeks after that cord blood transplant Cord Blood transplant patients are at higher risk of having infectious complications related to the transplanted. Self where we're trying to take that problem and solve it. I was working in the lab of dr. Irv Bernstein who is a stem cell biologist and he had just discovered ways of essentially fooling stem cells into thinking they're in the bone marrow environment and to making them self replicate and what we found was that we could isolate these stem cells and for every stem cell we put into culture we could get anywhere from 150 to 500 back out. We're now in our third clinical trial using these expanded cells and so what that 

Disease patients are getting the same number of these blood-forming stem cells as someone who gets a bone marrow transplant or a peripheral blood stem cell transplant and that's translated to a quicker time to white blood cell recovery and much less risk of infection and the other regimen related toxicities. We see early after the transplant. 

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