Cord blood banking, in essence, is an advanced procedure in which the blood of the mother’s umbilical cord is collected following the delivery. The blood contains a huge amount of stem blood cells, which can treat and prevent various life-threatening diseases.
Why, though?
The placenta in your cord blood is something that is also found in your bone marrow. Hence, if someone is suffering from blood cancer or leukemia, this blood can be used to treat them.
Furthermore, the same stem cells are also used to improve your immune system and prevent it from attacking your own organs. This issue is pretty common in autoimmune diseases.
Apart from that, cord blood is also used for many other health issues related to your heart and genes. That’s why preserving it has become extremely important and popular nowadays.
Cord Blood Expansion – A New Technique?
Currently, cord blood is being used in the segment of a bone marrow transplant, in order to take care of blood cancer. However, alongside the same, many different new techniques are being used to find better uses for the collected cord blood.
And amongst them, cord blood expansion is something to be talked about. The research, in this aspect, is basically used to increase the number of cells available in the collected blood. It, in turn, can increase the utility of blood in various medical fields, including:
- Blood-related transplantation, and
- Regenerative medication
And if it’s developed and used properly, the technique may also be quite beneficial for us in a lot of different ways. These may include the following:
- Boosting the number of therapies from only a single cord blood collection,
- Extending the overall time frame of the usage of the cord blood
- Offering a higher amount of stem cells through a single collection
Besides, the aspect of expanded blood cells can also make it easier for the blood to be utilized for a treatment procedure. Also, as the adults need more blood cells for treatment, they’ll get a lot of help with the expansion technique, as it can increase the number of cells.
The Approaches
As of now, there are two different techniques being used to perform a cord blood expansion procedure. Here’s what you need to know about them:
1: By Using HLA Matched Units
In this case, the Gamida cell, a biotech organization, employs a small molecule (known as nicotinamide) in order to expand the number of progenitor and blood-forming stem cells. In a 3-week procedure, it’s been seen that this method can result in an 80-fold boost in stem cells.
And a 400-fold increase is seen when talking about cellularity.
Conversely, Excellthera, another company with similar roots, has used a molecule, known as UM171, to improve its technique even further. It has resulted in an increase of 100-fold when considering the cord blood cells. This procedure has been more impactful as per reports.
2: By Using Unmatched Cord Blood (Expanded)
Fred Hutchinson Center, alongside Nohla Therapeutics, has demonstrated that the aforesaid or non-HLA-based cord blood expansion can be used too. In this case, the researchers tried to do an infusion between a number of non-expanded and a few expanded blood cells.
According to a report, this process resulted in a more rapid recovery of platelet and neutrophil compared to a historical control group. This, in turn, tends to overcome the restriction of most of the lower cell doses that are associated with a single-unit blood transplant.
However, this procedure is still quite new and has yet to yield any positive results as a whole.
The Final Say!
Cord blood banking, due to how beneficial it is, has been growing in popularity for quite a lot of time. And, you can expect it to grow even more, considering how rapidly the research of the same is growing. So, if you want to save your and your family’s life, it might be best to invest in this procedure at the earliest.
Anyway, now, we’ll be concluding our article. If you want to get more information about the same, make sure to comment below. You might also let us know if you want to add something to our article. We will definitely add them as needed.
