About cord blood stem cells
Hemafund / For professionals / Stem cells: Yesterday and Today / About cord blood stem cells
Scientific discoveries of the last decades in the areas of biology, fundamental and clinical medicine have definitely proved high medical and biological value of umbilical blood, since it is an important and safe source of stem cells. Stem cells are undifferentiated cells, that are first formed in embryos organism and are able to differentiate into specialized tissues. Discovery of stem cells is the third discovery by weight in the history of medicine after decoding of the DNA and the “human genome” program.
Depending on maturity degree and origin, there are several tens of stem cell types, although the term “stem cells” is very often identified even by specialists as “embryonal stem cells”, which is inadmissible. But embryonal stem cells can be derived from embryonal tissues only, which is accompanied by a great number of ethical and juridical obstacles in the majority of countries of the world. In addition, taking into account a high proliferative potential of the embryonal cells, there are reports about a possibility of developing of malignant clones from them.
Among more mature and specialized stem cells, hemopoietic and mesenchymal stem cells have the greatest practical importance for the clinical medicine. Hemopoietic stem cells represent the most studied population of stem cells. But transplantation of stem cells, more known as transplantation of bone marrow since bone marrow is the main source of hemopoietic stem cells, has been widely used for several decades in treatment of malignant diseases of blood.
However, hematological transplantation has a serious difficulty of choosing immunologically compatible donor of bone marrow according to the main histocompatibility system (HLA). In developed countries, search for bone marrow transplants is done by special registers associated into international systems with many thousands databases containing data on immunofenotypes of volunteers being ready to donate bone marrow. Though, the probability to find compatible donor bone marrow transplant constitutes from 1 per 1000 to 1 per 1 000 0000 and significantly depends on race and ethnic origin of the patient. The number of donors-volunteers is limited by invasive and quite traumatic procedure of bone marrow donation. Thus, doctors’ efforts during the last decades have been concentrated on searching for alternative sources of hemopoietic stem cells and auto-donation, but the latter one is contraindicated in many forms of leukemia.
In the above-stated terms, umbilical (cord) blood can be fairly considered as the most safe, profit-proved and absolutely ethic source of hemopoietic stem cells. An important peculiarity of stem cells of umbilical blood is also their high immunological tolerance, which even in a case of incomplete histocompatibility according to the HLA system is characterized by less probable development of the “transplant-versus-host” disease compared to usage of bone marrow.
It is also known, that activity of the enzyme telomeraza decreases in stem cells in the process of aging, which reduces their ability to differentiation and proliferation. This fact raises biological value of stem cells of umbilical blood collected in the first minutes of life, when they have not been exposed to adverse influence of the environment and are characterized by a lower tendency to mutations and a higher proliferative activity than cells extracted from bone marrow of an adult organism.
Usage of stem cells has been limited by oncohematology for a long time. However, researches of the last years proved that umbilical blood contains also other types of stem cells, particularly, mesenchymal stem cells, hemangioblasts (precursors of endotheliocytes of vessels) and a special population of pluripotent stem cells which are very close to the embryonal cells in their ability to differentiate into cardiac and nervous tissues, but their derivation is absolutely ethic as opposed to others. There are data that the pluripotent stem cells found in umbilical blood are not detected in any other tissue of the organism. This fact considerably broadens medical importance of umbilical cord blood as a source for regeneration of affected tissues of myocardium, brain and spinal cord, treatment of diseases of the locomotor apparatus. New approaches for cultivation of organs are being elaborated with usage of the cell fraction of umbilical cord blood. In addition, during the last years, studies of umbilical blood T-lymphocyte’s ability to destroy malignant cells with prospects of their use in treating oncological diseases have activated. Umbilical blood serum has a value as a source of series of important biologically active substances, that are absent in blood of adults, and peculiarities of cord erythrocytes, particularly, a presence of fetal hemoglobin, which makes them more physiological as a transfusion medium for usage in the neonatal surgery.
The main differences of umbilical blood components from the peripheral blood of an adult:
- Presence of a great number of different populations of stem cells in the leukocytic fraction of the umbilical cord blood. The major populations are hemopoietic, mesenchimal, pluripotent stem cells, and angioblasts.
- Presence in umbilical blood serum of series of biologically active substances making a general stimulating effect on the organism.
- Larger number of reticulocytes and thrombocytes.
- Presence in fetal blood of hemoglobin which increases its affinity to oxygen.
- Low antigenic nature.
- Antimalarial effect.
- Higher electric conductivity.
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