The largest study yet of transplants using cord blood for patients who have no related donors shows a lessened risk of potentially fatal reactions that can result when people get marrow from donors whose tissue types are not closely matched. The procedure was wildly successful beyond anyone's expectations,'' said LeeAnn Jensen of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, who oversaw funding for the study.
Marrow transplants are a standard part of cancer treatment.
In an attempt to kill cancer, doctors often give such high doses of chemotherapy that they also destroy the bone marrow, which manufactures blood cells. Stem cells can also be retrieved from the bloodstream, and in the latest study, doctors harvested them from blood in the discarded umbilical cords of newborns at two New York City hospitals. Eighty-one percent of the transplants in the study were considered successful, meaning the blood graft took hold within six weeks. The study, directed by Dr. Pablo Rubinstein of the New York Blood Center, was published in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine. It reviewed transplants at 98 U.S. and foreign hospitals using cord blood from his program, the first and largest public placental blood bank in the world.