Cord blood can save the lives of sick people just like bone marrow cells. However, in Poland it is most often irretrievably lost – experts estimate. Therefore, in September, a social campaign to collect umbilical cord blood for a public bank begins.
The organizers of the XNUMXnd edition of the nationwide Umbilical Blood Days campaign announced it on Wednesday at a press conference in Warsaw.
“During the campaign, every woman giving birth in one of 16 hospitals in selected Polish cities will be able to selflessly donate her child’s umbilical cord blood for public needs,” said Tomasz Baran, a doctor from the Polish Stem Cell Bank (PBKM), the initiator of the project.
The action is carried out in cooperation with the Ministry of Health and the POLTRANSPLANT Organizing and Coordination Center for Transplantation and aims to increase the resources of cord blood in Poland, which, like bone marrow, contains invaluable stem cells and can be used in the treatment of, for example, blood cancers.
“In our daily practice, we have never had any of the women – of course after prior notification – refused to collect and donate umbilical cord blood freely,” said Dr. Anna Cyganek from the Clinical Hospital. Infant Jesus in Warsaw, which, in April 2011, was the first center in the country to collect umbilical cord blood for public purposes in cooperation with PBKM.
She emphasized that collecting umbilical cord blood is a simple, short and non-invasive procedure, completely harmless to the newborn and the mother. Shortly after the baby is born and the umbilical cord is cut, the umbilical vessel is punctured and blood is drawn until the placenta detaches, which usually occurs within 30 minutes after birth.
The data presented by Tomasz Baran shows that currently as much as 98 percent. cord blood is destroyed in Poland, and only 2 percent. collected, of which approx. 95 percent. goes to family banks, mainly to PBKM, and approx. 5 percent. for public needs.
“We can not lose this valuable cellular material only when we collect it” – emphasized Dr. Cyganek. She pointed out that, unlike family banking, which can only be used by the family, any needy person (e.g. with leukemia or lymphoma – PAP) can come to the public umbilical cord blood bank. As such a sample goes to the POLTRANSPLANT register, information about it is available all over the world. This means that its potential recipients are several billion people in the world. The condition for receiving such blood is its tissue compatibility with the recipient.
“Therefore, the more umbilical cord blood we have in a pool in a public bank, the greater the possibility that a given patient will find suitable stem cells” – explained Dr. Cyganek.
According to the transplantologist Dr. Dariusz Boruczkowski from PBKM, one of the pioneers of cord blood transplantation in Poland, its advantage is, among others the fact that the biological material “waits” for the patient in need of it, deposited in liquid nitrogen. However, in the case of bone marrow stem cells, the patient waits for the appropriate donor and his cells.
In 2011, PBKM collected 482 portions of umbilical cord blood for public purposes, most of which were disqualified (including too few stem cells in the sample). 140 portions were submitted to POLTRANSPLANT, which can be used to treat people unrelated to the donor, and thanks to funding from the Ministry of Health, it was possible to finance 100 samples, and thanks to PBKM’s own funds – 40. In total, thanks to last year’s campaign, public umbilical cord blood resources increased in Poland by 30 percent.
“These resources are not yet sufficient and satisfactory, but we hope to achieve at least the same result with this year’s campaign,” said Baran.
According to Dr. Cyganek, the greater the education of the society and the greater support for this type of action, the greater the possibility that the umbilical cord blood pool in Poland will be greater. “It is hoped that in the future – perhaps in the near future – the collection of umbilical cord blood for public purposes will become a routine activity in our country” – summed up Dr. Cyganek.
Unfortunately, the preparation, testing and storage of stem cells costs money. That is why umbilical cord blood transplants are more common in the richest countries in the world, such as the USA, ”said Dr. Boruczkowski. The American data show that in the USA, umbilical cord blood is mainly used for transplantation of blood stem cells in children. In the world, umbilical cord blood transplants currently account for approx. 20 percent. all stem cell transplants. (PAP)
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