The two hospitals best known for cord blood transplants are the University of Minnesota and Duke Medical Center. Duke Medical Center does approximately 100 transplants a year – everything from leukemia to lysosomal storage diseases. There have only been a handful of Tay-Sachs children transplanted. To most success transplant is a child named Jordan Lehman – he was transplanted at 14 month and at age 8 is actually gaining skills.

Additionally Hunter Combs is now eight years old after being tranplanted at 14 months. We believe surviving over 8 years of age with Infantile Tay-Sachs disease has never been done before.

The source of stems cells is usually from HLA-matched related or unrelated donors. For children without a suitable donor, stem cells from unrelated umbilical cord blood look to be an acceptable alternative.

The current study reports the outcomes of 23 children who received umbilical cord blood transplants for advanced MDS. All patients were treated with myeloablative regimens, which involved total body irradiation in 78%. Event-free survival was 70% at one year and 61% at three years. Better outcomes were associated with ages under 11 years and weight less than 38 kg.

Dr. Joanne Kurtzberg, a professor of pediatrics and pathology at Duke University, was conducting a study where children with cerebral palsy were injected with their own cord blood cells.

In May of 2008, at the age of 2, Chloe Levine received a 15-minute re-infusion of her stem cells. “The doctor is really cautious about what she tells patients,” Chloe’s mom, Jenny Levine said. “She didn’t have a whole lot of results coming in. The best case scenario, we’d see signs of improvement in six months to a year.”

Dr. Charles Cox, from the University of Texas-Houston Medical School, said if the parents do not choose to save the cord blood, it is considered medical waste and thrown away.

“Really, the issue of cord blood banking today comes down to trying to understand what the future holds in terms of regenerative medicine as a field,” Cox said. “So, the long-term look is, and even the intermediate-term look is that it’s not science-fiction. I see it expanding and accelerating over the next two to five years.”
Within four days, her parents saw a noticeable difference, although Kurtzberg said most kids show benefits three to nine months later.

The rigidity on Chloe’s right side loosened up and her speech started to improve. She was able to ride her toy tractor, which in the past had been too difficult for her to pedal.

“Her life is completely normal, she doesn’t drag her right foot, she can use her right hand,” Jenny Levine said. “She rides a bike, a scooter…we’re taking her skiing this year. She’s fabulous.”

At this time, Kurtzberg said she does not know how long the effects of cord blood will last on kids like Chloe, but if there is a good chance it will be “durable and last indefinitely.” This is essential, since most babies have enough cells for only one infusion.

“We believe our finding provides evidence that using two units of UCB for transplantation may be more effective in preventing leukemia relapse and gives hope to patients with hematological malignancies so that they may live cancer-free,” says Michael Verneris, M.D, leader of the research team.

This incredibly hopeful finding has the potential to change the current medical practice of using one unit of UCB for treatment of patients who are at high risk for recurrence of leukemia and other cancers of the blood and bone marrow.

The guidelines now note that acute myeloid leukemia should be treated based on regimens that have been established in clinical trials, and they emphasize the importance of using the regimens consistently and not mixing induction from one with consolidation from another.

The guidelines also now list umbilical cord blood as an alternative source for patients with acute myeloid leukemia who are candidates for allogeneic stem cell transplant but do not have an appropriate sibling or unrelated donor available.

Less than a year after the successful operation, the child is well on the road to full recovery from this treatment and a number of other precautions taken to ensure well-being, including a healthy diet, organic bedding, and light exercise to keep energy up – something that always helps with treatment.

S Abhayakumar, vice-chairman of LifeCell, which helped preserve Pugazhendi’s cord blood stem cells in Chennai, said a new-born sibling’s umbilical cord blood provided a better chance of HLA matching as there is a 25% chance for a perfect match and 50% chance for partial match. “A sibling’s cord blood for transplant lowers the chances of donor rejection. Therefore, it is a preferred source for transplantation,” he said.

The National Institute of Health ’s guidelines follow President Barack Obama’s original lift of the Bush Administration’s research restrictions in March. The stipulations of the new guidelines say creation of new embryonic stem cell lines cannot be federally funded. A cell line must be derived through private or corporate funding, or in other countries. But after this first step further research can be federally funded, said Dan Kaufman , associate director of the University’s Stem Cell Institute.

Families using pre-implantation genetic diagnosis , a technology that screens embryos to determine a healthy donor for an ill child, do not choose diseased embryos for implantation, Kaufman said. Those embryos can then be used for federally funded research.

Dr Smith and his colleagues have identified two types of stem cells which they believe are effective in addressing these two characteristics of autism:

CD34+ cord blood stem cells – Dr Smith’s colleague Dr Fabio Solano injected this type of stem cell into a patient to improve blood flow to the brain and therefore increasing the brain’s oxyegn supply.
Mesenchymal stem cells (MSC) – This stem cell has been used in the past to treat immune dysregulation in Crohn’s Disease sufferers and was used by the research team to treat inflammation in autistic children.

You can read their research and findings at http://www.translational-medicine.com/content/5/1/30#IDABE20Y

An eight year old girl was treated with a combo package of stem cell transplant. The transplanted stem cells were collected from different sources of her one year old brother, some portion of required stem cells came from cord blood, which was harvested from the umbilical cord of her brother.

In a Dr. Revathy Raj, Consultant Paediatric Haemato Oncologist, Apollo Speciality Hospital, Chennai, though thalassemia is cured but the patient should be very careful regarding the risk of infection at least for a year, as she will be having immuno-supressing drugs for one year to minimize the rejection risk of the transplanted stem cells.

A number of research studies have shown that stem cells taken from umbilical cord blood have several advantages over marrow and circulatory blood derived genes. Bone marrow still leads ahead of umbilical cord blood for some procedures and diseases, but it is widely believed in the medical community that the trend will sway in favor of cord blood even more in the near future.

The future of this new type of treatment is exciting, despite its current minority status in the world of transfusions. Scientists are almost certain that an person´s own cord blood will, at some point, be effective in the treatment of their own cancers. This is because the majority of adult cancers simply aren’t genetically derived, whereas pediatric cancers invariably are.

Medical researchers are hard at work finding ways of manipulating the leukemia gene, so that eventually even your own blood may be used to cure yourself, thus making cord blood even more valuable as an insurance against future ailments and disease.