Family umbilical cord blood pool to cure a host of blood-related disorders

With growing evidence that Umbilical Cord Blood Transplant (UCBT) is one of the major treatment options for various genetic and blood-related diseases, the concept of cord blood pool banking is gradually developing in India.

Doctors say that over 95 per cent of blood-related disorders can be treated using umbilical cord blood (UCB) from a donor. Keeping this in mind, a cord blood bank has introduced the first Family Umbilical Cord Blood Pool Banking concept in the country.

MyCord, a vertical of CelluGen, a government-licensed cord blood bank, advocates that each UCB unit be privately banked and stored as part of a pool, thereby providing an easy access to patients to the best-matched cord blood unit.

"The idea behind the 'Family Cord Blood Pool Bank' is to create a balance between insufficient cord blood units in public banks and the utility of stored blood units in pool banks for allogeneic use with human leukocyte antigen (HLA) typing," Lalit Jaiswal, the director of CelluGen said.

HLA typing is done prior to cord blood storage to find the compatible cord blood unit at the time of requirement. Storing cord blood units without HLA typing renders them ineffective for use by others.

Even doctors advise parents looking for umbilical cord blood banking to consider pool banking, which allows access to others' cord blood units when needed.

"In most blood-related disorders, UCBT is recommended to be that of another person (allogeneic) and not your own (autologous). This is because the genes which caused the disorder are present in the cord blood. So for treatment, you require a healthy cell and not a mutant one," said Dr Rahul Bhargava, director, Haematology and MBT at the Fortis Memorial Research Institute, Gurgaon.

Government bodies have regularly been updating their recommendations on umbilical cord blood banking.

The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) guidelines of 2007 and 2012 state, "Use of stored umbilical cord blood for self-use is practically nil." Its 2017 guideline says, "So far there is no scientific basis for preservation of cord blood for future self use and this practice, therefore, raises ethical and social concerns."