Umbilical Cord Blood Banking and Transplantation

This comprehensive volume discusses the current scope of umbilical cord blood transplantation (UCBT), including recent controversies and future developments for improving clinical outcomes. Its twenty chapters introduce new applications in regenerative medicine and discuss the latest scientific, regulatory, clinical and investigational aspects of cord blood banking. Physicians from around the world provide a global collaboration which explores strategies for umbilical cord blood expansion, homing, unit selection, and combining of graft sources to improve patient outcomes. Umbilical Cord Blood Banking and Transplantation also reviews advances in pediatric UCBT for hematologic and non-hematologic disorders as well as immune recovery, which is critical to preventing infection. Finally, it compares UCBT with other graft sources in an attempt to understand the optimal graft source for the individual patient.  

UCBT is an important option for many patients who need a transplant but do not have a family donor or a matched unrelated donor. The collective and timely  knowledge presented here is essential reading for any regenerative medicine investigator, cord blood banker, transplant laboratory scientist or clinical physician interested in improving and expanding the applications of umbilical cord blood.

From the book reviews:

“This is a compendium of expert reviews of advances in production and different clinical applications of umbilical cord blood-derived stem cells (UCBSC). The purpose is to describe contemporary practice for UCBSC production and clinical applications. The book meets these worthy objectives. … This is a great resource for anyone involved in UCBSC production or transplantation.” (Valerie L. Ng, Doody’s Book Reviews, November, 2014)

Dr. Karen Ballen received her MD at Dartmouth College and then completed an Internal Medicine internship and residency at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, and a Hematology/Oncology fellowship at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston. She has held several attending physician appointments including Transplant Physician, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Children's Hospital, Boston; Director, Bone Marrow Transplant Unit, UMass Memorial Health Care; and Acting Division Director, Medical Oncology, UMass Memorial Health Care. Dr. Ballen is currently a Full Professor in the Department of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and director of the leukemia program, Massachusetts General Hospital. Her research interests focus on novel therapies for leukemia and transplantation. A particular area of specialty is cord blood transplantation for those patients who do not have matched related or unrelated donors. Dr. Ballen’s research has focused on improving outcomes after cord blood transplantation, and she has led multiple clinical trials focusing on double cord blood transplantation in adults, cord blood homing strategies, graft vs. host disease prophylaxis and infection prophylaxis. She has authored more than 100 papers in this field.