[Clinical use of placental blood cells]

Human cord and placental blood provides a rich source of hematopoietic stem cells. On the basis of this finding, umbilical cord blood stem cells have been used to reconstitute hematopoiesis in children with malignant and non malignant diseases after treatment with myeloablative doses of chemoradiotherapy. Early results show, that a single cord blood provides enough hematopoietic stem cells to provide short and long term engraftment, that the incidence and severity of graft versus host disease has been low even in HLA mismatched transplants. These results are encouraging enough, to embark on large scale banking of cord blood for purposes of future allogeneic and autologous stem cell transplantation, to promote studies on the unique properties of fetal and neonatal hematopoiesis, to study the immunological properties of cord blood cells, to initiate investigations on gene transfer into human cord blood cells for future gene therapy trials. This review will briefly summarize the current knowledge on cord blood transplantation as well as the future development of research on this unique source of hematopoietic stem cells.