Recently umbilical cord blood from Hawaii was used to treat a man in France with Hodgkin’s disease. This is not the first time Hawaiian UCB has gone international, another unit was sent to a patient in Spain. Hawaii has also donated cord blood to many patients in the states. One interesting find in the article is that some patients, like the man in France, are being treated with a double dose of UCB cells, and that these cells, which don’t even have to match, are able to work together inside the patient:
“It is becoming established that using two cord blood units is an effective way to do a transplant on an adult who might otherwise be too large for a single cord blood unit.”The two units don’t even have to match each other, he said. “Yet in the end, only one unit engrafts in the patient. Rather than fighting it out with each other, the cells from the two units somehow cooperate so that one of them eventually takes hold and grows in the patient.”
I don’t know about you, but I find that fascinating! And they don’t have to kill an embryo to do it!