A call for cord blood

Finding matched donors to provide bone marrow for the treatment of leukemia is not always easy, particularly if you are an African-American. Three out of five of those requiring a donor fail to find one, compared with only one in ten Caucasians who fail to find a donor. The use of umbilical cord blood, a very rich source of progenitor and stem cells, and thus, a viable alternative to bone marrow, is being strongly advocated by several centers in the USA. A federally funded program for collecting cord blood has recently begun in these centers. It took the National Marrow Donor Program ten years to build up a pool of four million individuals who are typed for potential bone-marrow donation; there are four million births per year in the USA, each a potential opportunity to collect cord blood. The use of cord blood has many other advantages, including a much lower probability of causing graft-versus-host disease, where donor immune cells reject the recipient tissue. The storage of cord blood is therefore proceeding rapidly, and the availability of such stores will greatly speed up the matching of donors and recipients. Several companies are also offering to store a baby's cord blood for potential future use. However, the costs can be significant (an average of $1 500 for collection and $95 per year for storage) and the likelihood of an individual ever needing this blood to treat their own leukemia is slight, standing at a 1 in 200 000 chance, according to the NIH. Nevertheless, as the list of diseases that might respond to stem-cell therapy expands (e.g. heart disease, see ‘Fixing a broken heart with bone’), perhaps the storage of your own cord blood might not be such a bad idea. LON