[Trials and analysis of umbilical cord blood collection, separation and cryopreservation methods for transplantation]

Placental and umbilical cord blood, as an alternative course of haematopoietic stem cells for bone marrow reconstitution, have recently been showed to yield successful sibling-donor cord blood grafts children. The advantages of using cord blood are related to the high number of haematopoietic progenitors in circulation at birth. In our study there was a remarkable heterogeneity of volume, number of nucleated cells and the number of progenitors from sample to sample. Seven out of 40 samples of more than 61 ml blood volume contained 1.8 (+/- 1.0) x 10(5) CFU-GM or 6.0 (+/- 4.8) x 10(8) nucleated cells. 10 ml of whole blood was necessary for laboratory tests including ABO blood type, screening of infectious markers, HLA typing, as well as frozen sera and cells for the possible future tests. Collected cord blood of more than 70ml in volume may have sufficient numbers of CFU-GM for engraftment to pediatric patients weighing about 20 kg. A cord blood bank project is now going on by collecting blood with informed consent of the mother in cooperation with obstetrics and gynecology staff.