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Milestones
| 1966 |
| Doctors Milton and Norman Ende pioneered the first published case of cord blood as cancer therapy. The Ende brothers are often overlooked in official histories of cord blood transplantation because they did not use immune suppression before treating patients with cord blood, yet their publications demonstrated transient efficacy of cord blood alone. ref |
| October 1988 |
| Matthew Farrow, then a 5 year old boy with Fanconi anemia, received the world's first cord blood transplant. The pioneering medical event was an international effort: Matthew came from North Carolina USA, his donor was his newborn baby sister, the American scientist who stored the cord blood was Dr. Hal Broxmeyer, and the transplant was performed at the Hôpital Saint-Louis in Paris, where his French physician was Dr. Eliane Gluckman. ref1, PGCB |
| May 1989 |
| A team led by Dr. Edward A. Boyse, including Dr. Hal Broxmeyer, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that it was feasible to collect umbilical cord blood from birth, ship it to a lab, and cryopreserve it for later therapy. Dr. Boyce was a pioneer in immunology. ref1, ref2 |
| September 1989 |
| Natalie Curry also received one of the very first cord blood transplants with Dr. Gluckman, and went on to become a vocal advocate for cord blood education. Natalie's sister Emily was her cord blood donor, and later when Emily turned age 18 she also donated a kidney to Natalie. ref |
| January 1992 |
| Dr. Pablo Rubinstein spearheaded the founding of the world's first and largest public cord blood bank at the NY Blood Center. Dr. Rubinstein is also credited with pioneering methods of cord blood collection and storage that became industry standards. ref1, ref2 |
| 1993 |
| Mitch Santa became the first person to receive a cord blood transplant from an unrelated donor when he was less than 2 years old. He was cured of acute leukemia thanks to an anonymous baby whose cord blood had been donated to the NY Blood Center in its first year of operation. Dr. Kurtzberg performed the transplant at Duke Medical Center. ref |
| February 1995 |
| Dr. Mary Laughlin performed the world's first cord blood transplant for an adult leukemia patient. She was then at Duke Medical Center, but went on to found transplant programs at the Cleveland Cord Blood Center and the University of Virginia. ref |
| August 1996 |
| Dr. Mitchell Cairo and Dr. John Wagner led the first demonstration that long term patient survival is comparable with cord blood transplants and bone marrow transplants. Numerous researchers have reinforced this conclusion over the years, both for children and adult patients. ref1, ref2 |
| November 1997 |
| Stephen Sprague was the first adult to receive an "expanded" cord blood transplant where the cells were first grown in the lab before infusion. He was treated for CML leukemia in blast crisis by Dr. Andrew Pecora at the Hackensack Medical Center. ref |
| June 1998 |
| Dr. Frances Verter founded the Parent's Guide to Cord Blood website in memory of her daughter Shai. PGCB |
| December 1998 |
| Keone Penn was the first person cured of sickle cell disease by a cord blood transplant. As a child, he had endured a stroke and frequent episodes of pain before the transplant at Egleston Children's Hospital in Atlanta. Dr. Andrew Yaeger found a matching cord blood donor for Keone in the NY Blood Center public bank. ref |
| April 2001 |
| Shortly after he was born, Jesse was diagnosed with eye cancer that had invaded both eyes and his spinal fluid. His treatment at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada, culminated with the infusion of his own cord blood that had been stored with Insception Lifebank. Jesse was one of the first children who were saved because their parents had banked their cord blood privately. ref |
| September 2002 |
| Dr. John Wagner published a key study in the journal Blood that analyzed the influence of stem cell dose and degree of donor-patient match on the outcome of cord blood transplants. There have been many subsequent papers analyzing this topic. ref |
| April 2004 |
| Andrej was 6 months old when he became the first child to receive a transplant of his own cord blood to cure a malignant brain tumor called medulloblastoma. His cord blood had been stored with Eurocord-Slovakia, a partner of Cord Blood Center. The treatment took place at the University Children's Hospital in Bratislavia, Slovakia. ref |
| August 2004 |
| Dr. Ammar Hayani, together with colleagues at the Mayo Clinic, was the first to report using a child's own cord blood to perform a transplant for acute leukemia. Their publication in the journal Pediatrics explains that they tested the cord blood to make sure it did not contain the genetic mutations that were in the leukemia cells. The 3 year old girl's cord blood had been stored in the bank CorCell (now owned by CBAI), and the transplant took place at Advocate Hope Children's Hospital. ref |
| February 2005 |
| Abby Pell was the first child to receive her own cord blood stem cells, banked at Cord Blood Registry, as experimental therapy for brain injury. Abby suffered from oxygen deprivation at birth. Her mother had been turned away by doctors at multiple hospitals before Dr. Kurtzberg agreed to try the procedure at Duke Medical Center. ref |
| May 2005 |
| Dr. Joanne Kurtzberg and colleagues published the first paper demonstrating that cord blood transplants can stop the neurologic damage from metabolic storage disorders, by helping patients to create the metabolic enzymes they lack. Their initial work was with patients who had Krabbe's disease and appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine. Her group went on to treat dozens of other rare metabolic disorders. ref |
| October 2005 |
| Ryan Schneider was the first child diagnosed with cerebral palsy to be treated with his own cord blood. His cord blood had been stored with Cord Blood Registry and he was treated by Dr. Joanne Kurtzberg at Duke Medical Center. ref |
| October 2007 |
| Jake Liao was the first child to receive a cord blood transplant for a rare and fatal skin disorder called epidermolysis bullosa, or EB. The discovery that stem cell transplants could teach the body to produce missing skin proteins was made at the University of Minnesota, by a team led by Dr. John Wagner and Dr. Jakub Tolar. ref1, ref2 |
| March 2008 |
| Dr. J.J. Nietfeld, together with Dr. Verter and a team from CIBMTR, published an analysis of U.S. stem cell transplant statistics in the journal Biology of Blood and Marrow Transplantation. Over the course of a 70 year lifetime, more than 1 in 200 Americans has a stem cell transplant. ref |
| October 2009 |
| Dr. Vanderson Rocha and Dr. Eliane Gluckman published in the British Journal of Haematology that 20,000 cord blood transplants had been performed to date around the world. ref |
| September 2010 |
| Dr. Joanne Kurtzberg and and colleagues published a paper in the journal Transfusion describing the treatments given to the first 184 children who received their own cord blood at Duke Medical Center as therapy for acquired neurological disorders. These patients had diagnoses including cerebral palsy, hydrocephalus, oxygen deprivation at birth, hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy, stroke, etc. ref |
| March 2011 |
| Dr. Charles S. Cox Jr. and colleagues published in the journal Neurosurgery that giving children their own stem cells showed promise as a treatment for traumatic brain injury, the leading cause of death in children. Dr. Cox is a neurosurgeon who directs the pediatric trauma program at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston. ref1 |
| November 2011 |
| Ever since she performed the first cord blood transplant in 1988, Dr. Eliane Gluckman has led studies that compared the outcome of cord blood transplants with related versus unrelated donors, always finding that related are better. The first publication in NEJM in 1997 found survival was more than double with related donors. Unrelated transplants have improved over time, but a publication in Haematologica in 2011 still found survival 1.5 times better with sibling donors. ref |
| August 2012 |
| Dr. Michael Chez, director of pediatric neurology at the Sutter Neuroscience Institute in Sacramento, launched the first clinical trial to treat children who have autism with their own cord blood. According to the CDC, the number of U.S. school children on the autism spectrum doubled over the decade from 2006 to 2016, from 1 in 110 to 1 in 54. ref1, ref2 |
| December 2012 |
| Dr. MinYoung Kim and colleagues at CHA Bundang Medical Center in South Korea published the first proof that cord blood is effective in the treatment of cerebral palsy. Results from a placebo-controlled, double-blind clinical trial were published in the journal Stem Cells. ref1, PGCB |
| December 2012 |
| Parent's Guide to Cord Blood reported that by the end of 2012, family banks around the world had released over 900 cord blood collections for therapy. Overall, roughly half went to sibling transplants and half were used by the child from which the blood was banked. PGCB |
| April 2013 |
| Dr. John Wagner performed the world's first cord blood transplant of a child who had both leukemia and HIV. The goal was to cure both by transplanting cord blood from a donor who carries a rare genetic mutation that confers resistance to HIV. Dr. Wagner heads the University of Minnesota's transplant program. ref1, ref2 |
| July 2013 |
| Dr. Karen Ballen, together with Dr. Gluckman and Dr. Broxmeyer, published a review of the first 25 years of cord blood transplantation in the journal Blood. To date, more than 30,000 cord blood transplants have been performed around the world. ref |
| September 2014 |
| Dr. Hal Broxmeyer, the scientist who invented our standard protocols for banking cord blood, has demonstrated that cord blood that was cryopreserved more than 23 years can be thawed to recover a yield of viable stem cells that is undimished by time. PGCB |
| December 2015 |
| Dr. Ilya Yemets, together with colleagues at the Center for Pediatric Cardiology in Kiev Ukraine, has performed over 100 surgeries in which children with severe congenital heart defects received their own cord blood to support their cardiopulmonary bypass. ref1, PGCB |
| August 2017 |
| Dr. Karen Ballen has updated her world review and to date, more than 40,000 cord blood transplants have been performed around the world. ref |
| October 2017 |
| Duke University has received FDA approval for an Expanded Access Protocol that allows cord blood infusions (autologous or sibling) to treat acquired brain disorders. In the following years, the waiting list for this EAP program has grown to thousands of children. ref |
| November 2018 |
| Parent's Guide to Cord Blood reports that the world inventory of cord blood in storage is now about 750 thousand in public banks and nearly 7 million in family banks. More than 60% of the world's privately banked cord blood is managed by the Top 10 largest companies. PGCB |
| March 2019 |
| Dr. Juliet Barker of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center is the leading expert on the use of double cord transplants to treat adults. She has argues that cord blood transplants remain a vital resource for patients that are not represented on bone marrow registries and/or possess rare genetic types. ref1, ref2 |
| June 2020 |
| The NY Blood Center suddenly curtailed their famous cord blood donation program, ceasing all collections and letting go all research staff. A small crew continues to work in the laboratory to maintain the inventory and release units called for transplant. Both current and former employees are forbidden to speak of this shut down. |
| February 2021 |
| Cryo-Cell International has obtained exclusive commercial rights to cord blood and cord tissue therapies developed at Duke. Cryo-Cell plans to open infusion clinic(s) that will enable broad public access to any Expanded Access Protocols approved for Duke therapies. PGCB |
| June 2021 |
| Gamida Cell has run over a dozen clinical trials to establish that transplants of their expanded cord blood product Omidubicel (aka NiCord) achieves neutrophil engraftment in a median of 12 days, which is even faster than bone marrow transplants. ref1, PGCB |
