Texas has one of the 20 national cord blood banks and is now beginning to recruit donations from mothers, according to this article in the Brownsville Herald.
A statewide blood bank soon will begin collecting umbilical cord blood, which has the potential to save the lives of leukemia and lymphoma patients, in the Rio Grande Valley.
The Texas Cord Blood Bank, a division of South Texas Blood & Tissue Center in San Antonio, will start collecting cord blood in May from consenting families at Valley Baptist Medical Center in Harlingen and Brownsville, Carmen Davila, spokeswoman for the center, said.
“We wanted to expand to the Valley because of its diversity,” Davila said. “That’s something that is key and can improve the chances of a (donor-recipient) match.”
Cord blood, which is extracted from the umbilical cord and placenta after birth, often is rich in stem cells, or cells that have not yet differentiated. These cells can produce many other types of blood cells, and therefore can be used to treat leukemia, lymphoma and blood disorders.
More and more doctors are using cord-blood stem cells instead of bone marrow stem cells to treat patients with leukemia, Brownsville oncologist and hematologist Dr. Balesh Sharma said.
With cord blood, “there’s a low risk of complications after the transplant,” Sharma said.
Some bone marrow transplant recipients are at risk of “graft versus host disease,” a possibly fatal complication in which the donated cells attack the recipient’s tissues, Sharma said. Cord blood transplant recipients are at a lower risk of this complication.
Unfortunately, the reporter ended the article with a comment that embryonic stem cells would be even better than the umbilical cords stem cells.
Well,she might be right if the embryonic cells didn't require oocyte donation, the generation of a human embryo and then much more work and time to expand the number of cells and as-yet unknown techniques to ensure that the cells become exactly the sort of cells we need. Or, if anyone had actually ever been successfully treated with embryonic stem cells.
1 comment:
Cool! This cord-blood is looking very promising. I look forward to seeing more concrete information on its practical benefits becoming available when it goes into mass-use... another five years or so should do it. Medical technology always takes so long to move from lab to trials to large-scale use.
Though personally, I wouldn't want to close the possibility of embryonic stem cells. Their potential is higher than any other, they are just very hard to work with. If you ever want to see fresh organs grown in a lab ready for transplant or similar science-fictiony supertech, that will almost certinly require the use of embryonic cells at some point. So.. just keep the options open.
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