Unlicensed umbilical cord blood units provide a safe and effective graft source for a diverse population: A study of 2456 umbilical cord blood recipients.

Allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HCT) is a curative procedure for patients with some hematologic malignancies, bone marrow failure syndromes, and genetic diseases.1 The optimal donor is often an HLA-matched related donor (MRD), however only 30% of patients have a match in their family. There are over 20 million adult volunteer donors enrolled in the Be The Match ® (BTM) international unrelated donor registry, but it remains difficult for Black, Hispanic, and Caucasian patients of non-Western European ancestry to identify a matched unrelated donor (MUD) in the registry.

Source: Biology of Blood and Marrow Transplantation - November 18, 2019 Category: Hematology Authors: Karen Ballen, Brent R. Logan, Pintip Chitphakdithai, Michelle Kuxhausen, Stephen R. Spellman, Alexia Adams, Rebecca J. Drexler, Merry Duffy, Ann Kemp, Roberta King, Aleksandar Babic, Colleen Delaney, Chatchada Karanes, Joanne Kurtzberg, Lawrence Petz, And Source Type: research