Pregnancy and Childbirth Pregnancy Basics

Can You Give Life Twice to Your Child?

In the West, obstetrics have been revolutionized by technology and monitoring, including epidural anesthesia. Mothers deliver with less pain and fewer complications. However, a new revolution is taking place in obstetrics, the possibility for parents to give life a second time to their child.
 

Cell Therapy: Give a Second Life

Cell therapy is the transplantation of living cells in the treatment of medical disorders. Cell therapy started many years ago by blood transfusion. More recently cell therapies have expanded to include bone marrow transplants. In this procedure, stem cells (seed cells, the precursor cells) are transplanted into patients whose immune systems have been destroyed, for example, by aggressive chemotherapy used to treat a cancer. Therapy with blood cells of the placenta/cord has been used for 11 years and seems to have a bright future.

Some parents have the placenta/cord blood of their newborn collected and stored for future use. This blood contains stem cells and seed cells, which can be used to treat  many hematological diseases, cancer, and genetic diseases.

The use of stem cells from the cord in the treatment of diseases was first described in 1989 by a French physician, Eliane Gluckman, who successfully used the placenta/cord blood in a patient suffering from Fanconi anemia (a recessive genetic disorder that affects the bone marrow of the bone marrow). The use of placenta/cord blood has many advantages as the newborn’s immune system is immature and, therefore, less prone to create a reaction between the donor and the receiver of a transplant. It is considered a valuable alternative to bone marrow transplant since bone marrow transplants are hard to find, difficult to collect, subject to infectious contamination, and a more expensive procedure.

The use of placenta/cord blood from a sibling with the same tissue type results in far fewer cases of both chronic and acute graft disease compared with the use of bone marrow from a sibling with the same tissue type.

One of the challenges of using stem cells or any organs from a donor is that the tissues need to be closely matched as any foreign substance introduced in an organism can be rejected. In some cases, the stem cells or some of the immune system components of an organ can attack the recipient. Such a reaction is known as the graft versus host disease (GVHD), a condition that can kill 20 to 40 percent of the recipients.

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