Umbilical Cord Blood Saves Lives

Stem cells are found in all multi-cellular organism. They retain the ability to renew themselves and can differentiate into a diverse range of specialized cell types. As stem cells can be grown and transformed into specialized cells with characteristics consistent with cells of various tissues such as muscles or nerves through cell culture, their use in medical therapies has been proposed.

Umbilical cord blood contains circulating stem/progenitor cells, and the cellular contents of umbilical cord blood are known to be quite distinct from those of bone marrow and adult peripheral blood. Over the past two decades, the presence and characteristics of hematopoietic stem cells in umbilical cord blood have been clarified. The frequency of umbilical cord blood hematopoietic stem/progenitor cells equals or exceeds that of bone marrow and greatly surpasses that of adult peripheral blood.

As cord blood stem cells are young and less mature, they can be transplanted even when there is a half match. Bone marrow transplant requires perfect match between donor and recipient.

Furthermore, umbilical cord blood provides no ethical problems for basic suties and clinical applications. Umbilical cord blood cells can be collected without any harm to the newborn infant, and umbilical cord blood hematopoietic stem cell grafts can be cryopreserved and transplanted to a host after thawing without losing their repopulating ability. For these reasons, umbilical cord blood could be a prominent source of cells for transplantation in various diseases. It remains obscure, however, whether umbilical cord blood contains stem/progenitor cells leading to endodermal cells, including hepatocytes.

Human umbilical cord blood cells can proliferate hepatocyte lineage cells in the original primary culture system in vitro, and differentiate into functionally mature hepatocytes in vivo. To our knowledge, this is the first evidence that human umbilical cord blood contains cells that produce endoderm-proliferating cells.

Umbilical cord blood is still in the early stages of use in scientific and medical research. Studying these cells will help researchers understand how they are able to transform into a wide array of more specialized cells that make up the human body. Some of the most serious medical conditions such as cancer and birth defects are caused by problems that occur somewhere in the cell process. A better understanding of how normal development occurs and disease processes can enable researchers to develop new and improved approaches to treating diseases and injuries.