Banking and Use of Umbilical Cord Blood

Umbilical Cord Blood (UCB) is an alternative source of hematopoietic stem cells for transplantation. A UCB bank is a multidisciplinary structure that is responsible for the recruitment, collection, processing, testing, cryopreservation, storage, listing, reservation, release, and distribution of units for administration. Also, UCB can be transferred for life-saving research. Before labor, adequate information and consent, including possibility of repurposing donation shall be performed. After delivery and using appropriate techniques placental blood can be collected and processed for therapeutic purposes. Cell processing normally consists of volume reduction to achieve a reasonable reduce of storage area. Automatic procedures have some advantages on reproducibility. A banking project starts with an establishment phase where banks should have a rapid growth to achieve their operational size. Then a maintenance phase follows, once the optimum inventory is achieved where UCB banks should focus in increasing quality and diversity. As consequence a decrease in numbers of newly added units are expected. The fact that less than 20% of collected units have more than 150x107 total nucleated cells, estimated to be the threshold for efficient inventories, challenge ethics of donation programs. Therefore, UCB banks need to research on alternative uses to add value to the surplus units and the available inventory. Finally, integration with other cell therapy services will reduce fix costs of operation and contribute sustainability.