Is it time to re-think a sustainable banking model for the Italian Cord Blood Network?

Abstract

Preview
Stem cell transplantation from unrelated cord blood (CB) units developed considerably from 2000 for about a decade due to the great interest of the scientific community in using CB transplants in the treatment of patients suffering from haematological diseases. The good results obtained encouraged several countries to establish CB banks and networks of banks to promote the collection of new units and to rapidly expand their inventory, without considering any threshold of total nucleated cells (TNC) in the CB. This trend permitted reaching 744,000 unrelated CB units available for transplantation worldwide1. […]