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Concern for the well-being of their children is second nature to parents. With around 60,000 infants diagnosed with cancer every year in India, new parents often consider stem cell therapy as the definitive approach. Transplantation of stored stem cells can help rebuild the haematopoietic and immune systems to treat a wide variety of cancer like leukaemia, lymphoma, neuroblastoma, etc. The biological fluid left behind in the umbilical cord and placenta after a baby is born is a rich source of haematopoietic and mesenchymal stem cells, which can proliferate indefinitely into a host of different types of specialised progenitor cells like nerve, muscle, and blood cells.
An Overview of Stem Cells
Cord blood is drawn in an aseptic process as soon as the umbilical cord is clipped and cut after the birth of a baby. The cord blood is well supplied with haematopoietic and mesenchymal stem cells. The unique properties of these cells are their ability to regenerate indefinitely and their undifferentiated state. In other words, these cells are unspecialised, and when transplanted, can gradually take on the morphological and biochemical properties to turn into specialised cells like blood, nerve, muscle, or bone cells.
The collected cord blood is transported to the cord blood bank laboratory, where the stem cells are segregated, tested, and screened for infections. Finally, the screened sample is cryogenically frozen to around -196°C using liquid nitrogen in a controlled process. The frozen cord blood stem cells are stored in specialised bank facilities under strict monitoring. These perfectly preserved samples are carefully thawed, retested, and prepared to ensure reliable treatment or therapies for life-threatening diseases in the future.
Stem Cell Therapy
As already established, stem cells have the unique potential to develop into many different cell types in the human body, supporting the body’s natural healing potential by repairing and regenerating diseased, dysfunctional, or injured tissues.
Stem cell therapy has revolutionised conventional treatments in cases of childhood cancer treatment, most commonly, Leukaemia, Lymphoma, and Neuroblastoma. The therapy helps rebuild the immune system, which becomes a decisive factor for recovery after high-dose chemotherapy or radiation.
Regenerative medicine has subverted the traditional approach to treatment by reducing the dependency on organ transplants, which often come with the risk of organ rejection.
The efficacy of stem cell therapy is unquestioned in cases of genetic disorders like Thalassemia, because it replaces defective cells with healthy ones, offering a potential cure rather than mere management.
Childhood Cancer
Children under the age of five had been reported to have suffered from neuroblastoma, medulloblastoma, and retinoblastoma, where a solid tumour appeared on their abdomen, chest, neck, or pelvis as a result of immature nerve cells. All three of these cancers can be successfully treated with the patient’s own cord blood stem cell therapy for cancer.
Blood cancers like the various forms of leukaemia are the most common cancers in children. However, children with pediatric blood cancer like leukaemia, or a hereditary blood disorder like thalassemia major or sickle cell anaemia require allogeneic transplantation, ideally from a matched sibling donor, because the diseases are genetic in nature and the child’s cord blood carries the strains of the same.
Stored Stem Cells and Childhood Cancer Treatment
Stem cells derived from umbilical cord blood can work as personalised medicine by using a patient’s own or a sibling’s stem cells for childhood cancer treatment. Enhanced efficacy and reduced risk of adverse reactions are the most significant features of stored stem cells. Stem cell therapy optimises cancer treatments by replacing dysfunctional cells and destroyed bone marrow with healthy ones, while targeting specific genetic anomalies within a patient’s tumour cells. They even allow exposure to more intense doses of chemotherapy, thus improving survival rates for high-risk cancers such as neuroblastoma.
Transplantation of preserved stem cells streamlines the treatment of malignant cancers. Opting for either autologous transplantation, stem cells from a child’s own umbilical cord blood, or allogeneic transplantation, stem cells from a matched sibling, significantly lowers the threat of immune system rejection or graft-versus-host disease. Experiments show that allogeneic stem cell transplantation is capable of countering cancer cells through a graft-versus-tumour effect, where the new immune system neutralises the remaining cancer cells.
Conclusion
To wrap up, this article aims to assist parents in making informed choices rather than being alarmed. Childhood cancers are rare, and even cases of pediatric leukaemia, neuroblastoma and other variants of cancer are treatable. Ongoing researches aim at finding means to prevent these diseases using cord blood stem cells.