Marie - Last year my daughter had a little girl and she was unable to donate the umbilical cord because the hospital that she was in had no program to handle cord blood donations. I have spent some time researching what options are available to let people know.

There are very few locations throughout the country that have programs for public cord donations. Most cords become medical waste. This first link is for the National Marrow Donor Program that will show you where there are hospitals that do have public & private programs available. The web site is http://www.marrow.org/HELP/Donate_Cord_Blood_Share_Life/index.html

Our communication with someone from the National Marrow Program led us to the only location in the United States that will send out a kit for any obstetrician to collect the stem cells from the cord & send them to their public bank, as long as the obstetrician works in an accredited hospital. This means that you can be anywhere in the U.S. and donate the cord. It is so very important to get a variety of ethnic groups because there are so many diseases that can be helped by cord blood stem cells. The link for this site is
/www.cryo-intl.com/what/cord-vs-bone/

This link gives you a great comparison as to the benefits of using cord blood. Additionally, if you want to donate the cord, you can go online & fill out a form & submit it to Cryobank. They send a kit out once they have checked out the form, and once the cells are collected, the kit is mailed to them. This process is FREE.

I hope this helps you & others that want to spread the word about donation of umbilical cords.

How do mothers arrange for the cord blood to be contributed to the bank? My only grandson’s mother is Cuban- Colimbian and my son Black. They plan to have one more child in the next couple of years, and would very much like to contribute that child’s cord blood.How do they do that?

We have been moving from 8, to 10, to now 12 HLA antigen matching in the last few years. I have no doubt the trend will continue, with ever higher number of HLA matchings required for adult donor blood stem cell transplants.

It all boils down to getting ever better matches between the patient and the new graft, in an attempt to decrease the risk of graft-versus-host disease (GVHD). A significant amount of morbidity and mortality associated with stem cell transplants is due to GVHD. It surely impacts quality of life for transplant patients.

However, there is another side to this equation. Most experts agree that if there is absolutely perfect match between donor and recipient (as in identical twins, for example), while it is true that GVHD is likely to be drastically reduced, so is the life saving graft-versus-leukemia (GVL) effect. In fact, many centers will not accept an identical twin as the source of donated stem cells. Without GVL the whole logic of mini-allo transplants goes out the window and risk of CLL relapse becomes a massive problem.

In other words, one wants the graft coming in to be just sufficiently ‘different’ so that it does not cozy up to the cancer cells remaining in the patient’s body. Too much familiarity is not a good idea when it comes to transplants! We don’t want the new immune system falling into the same old bad habits and allowing the cancer to grow unmolested.

The holy grail of transplant technology is how to reduce GVHD without missing out on GVL. We are learning how to do this, but the learning curve has been slow and painful. I will be writing about some of the sexy new approaches in clinical trials right now that address this question.

One of the most intriguing things about using cord blood as the source of stem cells is that they seem to have an intrinsic ability to mount powerful GVL (good thing), without going crazy over GVHD. I will go out on a limb here and agree with the comment made by one of the cord blood experts we interviewed: down the road, after we have learned how to do things right, cord blood will become the standard source of stem cells for transplants, and we will have less dependence on adult donors for this precious commodity.

Rita

Thank you for all your efforts on behalf of us CLLers.