Cord Blood Banking in Taiwn

Kuo-Sin Lin

《Journal of Genetics and Molecular Biology》 12卷4期 (2001/12) Pp. 222-222

https://doi.org/10.30047/JGMB.200112.0018

並列摘要

Objective: The marrow donor registry in Taiwan has started in 1993. Currently, the registry has over 210,000 voluntary marrow donors and the probability of finding 6/6 HLA match for domestic patients is estimated to be approximately 60%. Cord blood contains a sufficient number of haemopoietic progenitor cells and has been shown to be an alternative and even advantageous to bone marrow for transplantation. To date, a number of transplants using cord blood stem cells have been performed successfully. In Taiwan, the first public cord blood banking program is established in 1998 in our organization. Two more public cord banks started successively later. There are 3 private cord blood banks have established in the past one year or so. The preliminary data of our program are shown in this report.
Methods: The cord blood is collected after delivery from the placenta and processed by the method of Rubinstein. Collected volume of less them 45 ml and the total nucleated cell counts of less than 1 × 10^8 are not included for further processing.
Results and Conclusion: At the present time, more than 1000 units of cord blood have been collected, processed, HLA typed, tested for transmissible diseases and cryopreserved. Data show that the average cell number of the units are 1.0x 109 for nucleated cells, 3.5 × 10^6 for CD34 cells and 4.2 × 10^5 for CFU-GM stem cells. Fifty percent of the units were found to contain a sufficient cell numbers for haemopoietic reconstitution to patients up to a body weight of 20 kg. An estimation based on HLA gene frequencies shows that a collection of 500 units of cord blood is sufficient to provide patients with 90% of probability to find a 4/6-HLA-matched cord blood unit. These data show that the collected cord blood units are suitable to be used for transplantation.
Since there is still no regulatory mechanism and standard exist at the present state of umbilical cord blood banking in Taiwan, we consider it is the issue of utmost importance to be established.