Related Link: IU Medical Center

By Mary Hardin

The Indiana University Medical Center has been chosen one of seven institutions nationwide to participate in a $26.7 million National Institutes of Health study on the use of umbilical cord blood for transplantation.

Frank Smith (pictured), associate professor of pediatrics and principal investigator at IUMC, said the five-year study, if successful, could increase the accessibility of bone marrow transplantation because of the availability of cord blood.

Currently, individuals needing a bone marrow transplant can wait as long as four to six months before an unrelated bone marrow donor match can be made. If the cord blood study is successful, it could reduce the wait to two to four weeks, a critical issue when a matter of weeks can influence the outcome for some cancer patients.

Other transplant centers selected were Dana Farber Cancer Center in Boston, the Children's Hospital of Orange County (Calif.), the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Duke University and the University of Minnesota.

The transplants, all to be performed under the same clinical research protocol, will be in adults and children, and will be used to treat a variety of malignant and non-malignant diseases such as lymphoma, leukemia, aplastic anemia and severe combined immune deficiency.

Smith said the prospect of using cord blood for transplantation is exciting because it holds no risk to the donor, appears to be relatively safe in terms of infection and may result in less immune reaction.

Such transplantation could increase availability of donor units and target minority populations that are currently under-represented in bone marrow registries.

When a bone marrow transplant is used to treat a malignant or inherited blood disease, a donor match must be found within the family or from a limited number of unrelated individuals who have agreed to be bone marrow donors; the process to identify a suitable matched donor can take four to six months and is more difficult for patients who are from ethnic and racial minorities.

In contrast, banked cord blood would be rapidly available. It is also possible that cord blood, as opposed to bone marrow, may be useful even if not perfectly matched, thus increasing the pool of potential donors.

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