Guillermo Sanz, MD, PhD, Hospital Universitario y Politécnico La Fe, Valencia, Spain, outlines the main advantages and disadvantages of cord blood transplantation. Prof. Sanz explains that cord blood is easily obtainable and results in a lower incidence of graft-versus-host disease (GvHD) despite a much greater human leucocyte antigen (HLA) mismatch than other stem cell sources. The principal drawbacks of cord blood transplantation include long time to engraftment as well as a greater use of hospital resources due to the low cell dose in a unit of cord blood. Whilst previous attempts to increase the cell dose have been unsuccessful, nowadays, the efficiency of cell expansion is much greater in CD34+ and CD133+ progenitor stem cells, which results in shorter engraftment and better patient outcomes. This interview took place at the 48th Annual Meeting of the European Group for Blood and Marrow Transplantation (EBMT) 2022, which was held virtually.
