LEUKAEMIA patients and others with non-malignant diseases were turning increasingly to umbilical cord blood to improve their condition, a leading administrator of the service told the Albury-Wodonga Cancer Foundation yesterday.
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Ngaire Elwood, director of the BMDI Cord Blood Bank at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, was a guest speaker at the foundation’s annual meeting.
Dr Elwood said that blood taken from the cord or placenta was used mainly to provide transplant tissue for patients who couldn’t find a bone marrow donor.
Having cord blood available in a bank, stored frozen and fully tested, allows a fast response to patients in need of a stem cell transplant and was an alternative to bone marrow because there were similar characteristics.
One advantage of blood over marrow was that it allowed a certain degree of mismatch between donor and patient.
The Melbourne centre has banked more than 9000 cord blood units since 1996 while others in Sydney and Brisbane brought the total to 22,000.
Use of cord blood for transplants had risen dramatically in the past five or six years, especially as the service had extended to adults as well as children and was being used for different types of leukaemia and other diseases.
Dr Elwood said she expected the upward trend to continue and noted that US research was testing the use of cord blood for cerebral palsy.
The Melbourne bank has supplied more than 400 cord blood units for patients worldwide.
The bank employs specially trained midwives to collect cord blood from the Royal Women’s Hospital, the Box Hill Hospital and the Angliss Hospital.
Mothers having a baby at one of these hospitals who would like to inquire about becoming a cord blood donor can call the cord blood bank on (03) 9345 5834.
