Cord Blood Banking: Operational and Regulatory Aspects

Umbilical cord blood (UCB) is an alternative source of hematopoietic stem cells for transplantation in patients with hematological malignancies, bone marrow failures, immunodeficiencies, and inherited metabolic disorders. In order to facilitate these transplants, large repositories of frozen UCB units collected from altruistic unrelated donations have been established and to date there are more than 600,000 units stored in cord blood banks all over the world. These products have been collected, stored, and released for transplantation under stringent quality conditions in order to ensure their safety and efficacy. The development and evolution of the policies and procedures currently in use in cord blood banking have been largely influenced by the clinical outcome of the transplants performed using these units. This review will describe some of the main steps and procedures involved in the clinical banking of unrelated UCB donations starting from the recruitment and selection of the potential donor (the mother) to the final distribution of the unit to the transplant program and its clinical outcome follow-up.