Diseases Treated

This website was the first in 2003 to sort diseases treated with cord blood into 3 categories:

1. Standard Therapies
2. Therapies in Clinical Trials
3. Experimental Treatments

Before choosing the right form of cord blood banking it is also important to distinguish between two modes of treatment:

• Allogeneic - patient receives stem cells from a matching donor, either a sibling or an unrelated donor
• Autologous - patient receives their own stem cells

When parents donate cord blood to a public bank, they are supporting patients around the world who are searching for an unrelated Allogeneic donor. When parents save cord blood in a family bank, they are reserving the options that the baby can use its own stem cells for an Autologous treatment, or an immediate relative (sibling or parents) can use the stem cells for an Allogeneic treatment.

Here is a one page list of the roughly 80 standard therapies.

Standard Therapies with blood-forming stem cells

These are diseases for which transplants of blood-forming stem cells (Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplants, HSCT) are a standard treatment. For some diseases they are the only therapy, and in other diseases they are only employed when front-line therapies have failed or the disease is very aggressive. The lists below include ALL therapies that use blood-forming stem cells, without distinction as to whether the stem cells were extracted from bone marrow, peripheral blood, or cord blood. In the United States, most health insurance providers will pay for a stem cell transplant if it is a "standard therapy" for the patient's diagnosis.

Most of the diseases for which HSCT is a standard treatment are disorders of blood cell lineage. The proliferation by which blood cells are formed from stem cells is illustrated in the side graphic (click on the image to expand it).

Leukemia is a cancer of the blood immune system, where the cells are called leukocytes or white cells

Myelodysplastic Syndromes are also called pre-leukemia

Lymphoma is a cancer of the leukocytes that circulate in the blood and lymph vessels

Other Disorders of Blood Cell Proliferation

Transplants for Inherited Disorders of the Immune System & Other Organs

Transplants for Inherited Metabolic Disorders

Solid tumors not originating in the blood or immune system

Diseases and Disorders that have been in Clinical Trials with Cord Blood or Cord Tissue Cells

A "clinical trial" is a study in human patients for an emerging therapy that has not been adopted as standard therapy. This website has pages that enable patients to search worldwide for currently recruiting clinical trials with either cord blood or umbilical cord tissue MSC. The table below checks off all diagnoses that have ever been treated in clinical trials with cord blood or cord tissue, regardless of whether the trials are still open.

The phases of U.S. clinical trials in humans are defined as follows (in other countries phases may be different):

1. Phase 1: Safety study to see if the procedure or drug is well-tolerated.
2. Phase 2: Larger study to measure effectiveness of the new treatment against a control group.
3. Phase 3: Even larger study to compare the effect of various parameters such as dose and administration, and to monitor side effects prior to market release.
4. Phase 4: Post-marketing studies to learn even more about risks, benefits, and optimal use.

Neurologic Disorder

Auto-Immune Disorders

Cardiovascular

Diabetic

Genetic and/or Metabolic Disorders

Orthopedic

Other

Experimental Treatments

These are diagnoses for which stem cell treatments are being studied either in the laboratory with cell cultures or in animals that mimic the human disease. The experimental therapies are not yet in human clinical trials. In experimental research, it is often not clear whether an eventual therapy, if developed, would be Autologous or Allogeneic. Due to the explosion of stem cell research and the difficulty keeping track of which studies are promising, this section does not have a list.