Every year, millions of children are born across the world. Of these newly born babies, a sizable amount are born with a number of inherent metabolic disorders that require bone marrow transplants as the only viable option to keep them alive.
However, despite advancements in medical science and technology, it is extremely difficult to find donors with matching bone marrow profile that would reduce the potentially fatal graft-versus-host disease occurring when the donor cells perceive the recipient’s tissues and organs as foreign body.
Stem cell researches have gone a long way is solving this problem. Recent researches have found umbilical cords to be rich source of stem cells and it has the added advantage that unlike bone marrow transplants, umbilical cord blood transplants from unrelated donors can help save millions of babies every year.
Dr. Vinod Prasad and his colleagues at Duke University in North Carolina have studied 159 children with inherited metabolic disorders who received umbilical cord blood transplants from unrelated new-borns at Duke between 1995 and 2007. According to Dr Prasad, the cord blood cells are immunologically more naive than blood-forming stem cells derived from bone marrow and are more adaptable and less reactive once they get into the patient’s body.
Every year, millions of umbilical cords are disposed as medical wastes. It has become pertinent that ‘umbilical cord banks’ develop in every country that could form a rich source of stem cells capable of saving babies with life threatening diseases.
Source: tvnz
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