Human Umbilical Cord Blood Cells
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Cord blood, also known as placental blood, is the blood that remains in umbilical cord and placenta following a live birth. There are 3 sources of stem cells: umbilical cord blood, embryonic cells and bone marrow. Adult stem cells from bone marrow have limited uses while embryonic stem cell research is a major area of controversy. Umbilical cord blood stem cells are more proliferate and can be successfully substituted for embryonic stem cells in research and treatment.
Umbilical cord blood contains circulating stem/progenitor cells, and the cellular contents of umbilical cord blood are known to be quite distinct from those of bone marrow and adult peripheral blood. Over the past two decades, the presence and characteristics of hematopoietic stem cells in umbilical cord blood have been clarified. The frequency of umbilical cord blood hematopoietic stem/progenitor cells equals or exceeds that of bone marrow and greatly surpasses that of adult peripheral blood.
Human umbilical cord blood cells have many advantages as grafts for cell transplantation because of the immaturity of newborn cells compared with adult cells. In contrast to their hematopoietic and mesenchymal potential, it remains unclear whether umbilical cord blood cells have endodermal competences.
Furthermore, umbilical cord blood provides no ethical problems for basic suties and clinical applications. Umbilical cord blood cells can be collected without any harm to the newborn infant, and umbilical cord blood hematopoietic stem cell grafts can be cryopreserved and transplanted to a host after thawing without losing their repopulating ability. For these reasons, umbilical cord blood could be a prominent source of cells for transplantation in various diseases. It remains obscure, however, whether umbilical cord blood contains stem/progenitor cells leading to endodermal cells, including hepatocytes.
Human umbilical cord blood cells can proliferate hepatocyte lineage cells in the original primary culture system in vitro, and differentiate into functionally mature hepatocytes in vivo. To our knowledge, this is the first evidence that human umbilical cord blood contains cells that produce endoderm-proliferating cells.
Umbilical cord blood is still in the early stages of use in scientific and medical research. Studying these cells will help researchers understand how they are able to transform into a wide array of more specialized cells that make up the human body. Some of the most serious medical conditions such as cancer and birth defects are caused by problems that occur somewhere in the cell process. A better understanding of how normal development occurs and disease processes can enable researchers to develop new and improved approaches to treating diseases and injuries.
