title: Umbilical cord blood stem cells: what to expect.
abstract: Umbilical cord blood (UCB) is a valuable alternative source of hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs). It has unique advantages of easy procurement, absence of risk to donors, low risk of transmitting infections, immediate availability, greater tolerance of human leukocyte antigen (HLA) disparity, and lower incidence of inducing severe graft-versus-host disease (GVHD). In the last several years, these features of UCB permit the field of UCB transplantation (UCBT) to move at a faster pace for both children and adults with malignancies and nonmalignancies. However, new strategies and novel developments are expected to improve engraftment and reconstitution, and to enable in utero transplantation for early therapy, as well as to allow the therapy for a wide spectrum of human diseases.
authors.affiliation: Laboratory for Gynecologic Oncology, Women's Hospital/Department of Biomedicine, University of Basel, Switzerland. xzhong@uhbs.ch
authors.forename: Xiao Yan
authors.initials: XY
authors.lastname: Zhong
authors.forename: Bei
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Reza
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Asadollahi
authors.forename: Shyan Huey
authors.initials: SH
authors.lastname: Low
authors.forename: Wolfgang
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Holzgreve
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000818:Animals; D036101:Cord Blood Stem Cell Transplantation / Q000379:methods / Q000706:statistics & numerical data / Q000639:trends*; D005312:Fetal Blood / Q000166:cytology* / Q000502:physiology; D019337:Hematologic Neoplasms / Q000628:therapy; D006412:Hematopoietic Stem Cells / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007153:Immunologic Deficiency Syndromes / Q000628:therapy; D008659:Metabolic Diseases / Q000628:therapy