Stem Cell Biology in Health and Disease

It took exactly 100 years from the original discovery of the blood for-mation within the bone marrow until the first successful clinical bone marrow transplantation has been performed. Today, the transplantation of hematopoieticstem cells from various sources, such as bone marrow, mobilized stem cells aswell as umbilical cord blood has become a routine procedure, reaching currentlymore than 10,000 transplantations per year in the allogeneic setting and over 40,000autologous transplantations. Although, the number of transplantations is increas-ing every year, the field is constantly changing in terms of conditioning proceduresand clinical indications. In addition, the increase in the availability of multiple graftsources for allogeneic transplantation, such as related or unrelated living donorsversus frozen umbilical cord blood as well as the choice between mobilized periph-eral blood versus steady state bone marrow is challenging not only for transplantphysicians but also for the donors.This chapter provides an overview about the history of stem cell transplantation,current procedures and future developments in terms of donor selection and graftchoices for hematopoietic stem cell transplantation.