Umbilical Accord

FOUR MILLION BABIES ARE BORN in this country every year, bearing gifts of inestimable value. Foremost among these, of course, is the love they bring into the world and elicit from it. More practically, however, these infants bring with them something that we are learning has great potential to alleviate human suffering: the stem cells contained in the blood of their umbilical cords.

For example, as reported in the peer-reviewed medical journal Cytotherapy (Vol. 7, 368-373), umbilical cord blood (UCB) stem cells have restored feeling and some mobility to a woman who had been paralyzed with a spinal cord injury for 19 years. While we must remember that one dramatically improved patient does not an efficacious treatment make, the potential for cord blood to treat paralysis was further boosted with the recent announcement that rats with spinal cord injury also showed moderate improvement after being treated with human UCB stem cells (Acta Neurochirurgica, Vol. 147, 985-992).

That's not all. In a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine (352:20, May 19, 2005), infants with Krabbe's disease, a terrible illness that results in progressive neurological deterioration and death in early childhood, showed impressive improvement when treated before the onset of symptoms. UCB stem cells have also successfully treated sickle cell anemia. So far 67 human afflictions have been successfully treated with umbilical cord blood stem cells, and more may soon be added to the list. In animal studies, researchers have demonstrated the potential of UCB stem cells to treat stroke (Annals of the N.Y. Academy of Sciences, Vol. 1049, 84-96). Some of these cells also appear to be "pluripotent," that is, potentially able to transform into all tissue types--the characteristic supposedly making embryonic stem cells superior to adult stem cells, according to many researchers (Cell Proliferation, Vol. 38, 245-255).