Back when LifeSouth, UF Health Shands Hospital and the University of Florida College of Medicine teamed up to start LifeCord, Dr. John Wingard hoped that one of the first public umbilical cord blood banks in the southeast would give him a powerful option to treat his patients.“None of us knew where it was headed, but it seemed promising,” said Wingard, director of the Bone Marrow Transplant Program at UF Health.
LifeCord began collecting and banking umbilical cord blood from newborns in 1998, just 10 years after the first successful use of cord blood for a stem cell transplant to treat leukemia.
Cord blood is rich with blood-forming stem cells that can help patients in need of a bone marrow transplant. Cord blood transplants have successfully treated cancers, such as leukemia and lymphoma, and other diseases of the bone marrow. After a patient’s diseased marrow is destroyed, the transplanted cord blood stem cells act like seeds to re-grow healthy, functioning marrow that produces healthy blood cells.
Cord blood offers some practical advantages over traditional adult marrow or stem cell donations. While the tissue from an adult donor must be matched with near pinpoint accuracy to a recipient, cord blood can succeed with less perfect matching. It’s also tested, frozen and ready for transplant, saving time for patients in need.
“The use of cord blood was still in its infancy,” Wingard said of the early days. “Still today, the main use is in stem cell transplants for children and minorities, where we struggle to find adult donors.”
Over the years, doctors have continued to develope ways to open the possibility of cord blood transplants to more adult patients.
“It’s more challenging with adults. We typically have to use two cords from two different donors,” Wingard said. “We were skeptical at first, but we learned that two will work together and one will win out.”
And, while leukemia and lymphoma patients are the most common recipients, the organization Be The Match, which helps connect patients with matching cord blood units, says cord blood is now being used for the treatment of 80 different diseases.
“Not just new diseases — doctors are looking at new and different ways to use the cord blood to make it more effective,” said Richard Jones, director of LifeCord.
“It amazes me just how far these innovations are allowing us to stretch our helping hand with cord blood,”
Jones added. “We’ve now shipped cord units for transplants to 29 states and 16 foreign countries.”
Jones said another key advantage to cord blood is that it’s easy to collect. It’s done after the baby is born, it’s painless and safe for the mother and her baby, and there is no charge to the donor or hospital.
And, while cord blood is already saving lives today, Wingard said researchers are seeing more and more potential uses for the special cells in the field of regenerative medicine. Those uses include:
• Growing insulin-producing cells in the pancreas to treat diabetes.
• Growing cartilage to treat patients with rheumatoid arthritis.
• Treating patients with traumatic brain injury or Parkinson’s disease.
• Preventing graft-versus-host disease, one of the most common side effects of stem cell transplants.
“It’s exciting to think that a baby born today may provide a cure a decade from now to a disease that we now think is incurable,” Jones said.