Scientist are making discoveries every day, and many of them study the human body
and human stem cells in order to understand better the human body and maybe find solutions and cures to some terrible diseases.
These breakthroughs are leading in many cases into commercial use of some particular things. We can see for instance a lot more private stem cell banks specialising in stem cell collection and stem cells storage than a few years ago.
It seems that human umbilical cord blood cells have a lot of various advantages when using them as grafts for things like cell transplantation for example. The main advantage of theses stem cells is the fact that the newborn cells have this immaturity that you cannot have with adult cells.
One of the reasons why umbilical cord blood is of so much value is because it contains particular sells called progenitor cells. Some studies have also shown that the actual cellular content of the umbilical cord blood is very distinct from the content of bone marrow and adult peripheral blood, which in other words means it is more interesting to use umbilical cord blood to extract stem cells for example.
On top of that, using umbilical cord blood avoid getting into the ethical problems for basic studies or clinical applications because the blood or stem cells are taken from something that usually end up in medical bins in hospitals. Stem cell collection can be done on umbilical cord blood with no harm at all on a new born baby. Often, the next step following the stem cell collection is stem cells storage using cryopreservation. The advantage of this type of storage is that the stem cells taken from a stem cell bank can then be used and transplanted on somebody without losing the repopulating ability of the cells.
These are just a few reasons why a lot of scientists and private stem cells banks have turned toward umbilical cord blood to do stem cell collection and stem cells storage and then eventually use these cells on transplants to help cure various diseases.
The umbilical cord blood and stem cells still keep some of their mystery which guaranties a few more years of hard work for scientists all around the world.
But has times passes by, it seems that the umbilical cord blood and the stem cells extracted from it could really help a lot of people and help us cure some terrible diseases.