Umbilical cord blood stem cells: what to expect.

Umbilical cord blood (UCB) is a valuable alternative source of hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs). It has unique advantages of easy procurement, absence of risk to donors, low risk of transmitting infections, immediate availability, greater tolerance of human leukocyte antigen (HLA) disparity, and lower incidence of inducing severe graft-versus-host disease (GVHD). In the last several years, these features of UCB permit the field of UCB transplantation (UCBT) to move at a faster pace for both children and adults with malignancies and nonmalignancies. However, new strategies and novel developments are expected to improve engraftment and reconstitution, and to enable in utero transplantation for early therapy, as well as to allow the therapy for a wide spectrum of human diseases.