PURPOSE OF REVIEW 2008 marks the 20th anniversary of the first use of umbilical cord blood (UCB) as a source of donor cells for hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. In those early days, there was great doubt and skepticism about the utility of UCB as a source of hematopoietic stem cells. Doubts about whether UCB, containing 10-20x fewer cells than bone marrow, had sufficient cells to durabl...

The identification in murine bone marrow (BM) of very small embryonic-like (VSEL) stem cells, possessing several features of pluripotent stem cells, encouraged us to investigate if similar population of cells could be also isolated from the human umbilical cord blood (UCB). Here our approach to purify VSEL from human UCB is described by employing a two step isolation strategy based on i) hypoto...

Hematopoietic stem cells (HSC), including umbilical cord blood CD34+ stem cells (UCB-CD34+), are used for the treatment of several diseases. Although different studies suggest that bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (BM-MSC) support hematopoiesis, the exact mechanism remains unclear. Recently, extracellular vesicles (EVs) have been described as a novel avenue of cell communication, which may me...

P.C. Sen Gupta, S.P. Ghosal, A.K. Mukherjee, T.R. Maity, Departments of Pathology and Paediatrics, Institute of Child Health, Vivekananda Institute of Medical Sciences, 11 ‚ Dr. Biresh Guha Street, Calcutta 700017 (India) A few investigations were carried out following the observation of yellow rhomboidal crystals within neutrophiis in a severely jaundiced 2-month-old infant suffering from Pseu...

The first event in origination of many childhood leukemias is likely the presence of preleukemic clone (transformed hematopoietic stem/progenitor cells with preleukemic gene fusions (PGF)) in newborn. Thus, the screening of umbilical cord blood (UCB) for PGF may be of high importance for developing strategies for childhood leukemia prevention and treatment. However, the data on incidence of PGF...

We conducted a 45 patient prospective study of reduced-intensity conditioning (RIC) and transplantation of unrelated umbilical cord blood (UCB) and CD34(+) stem cells from a haploidentical family member. Median age was 50 years; weight was 80 kg. Fifty-eight percent had active disease. Neutrophil engraftment occurred at 11 days (interquartile range [IQR], 9-15) and platelet engraftment at 19 da...

objective: allogeneic transplantation with umbilical cord blood (ucb) in adult recipients is limited mainly by a low cd34+ cell dose. to overcome this shortcoming, human placenta as a novel source of human mesenchymal progenitor cell (mpc)- unrestricted somatic stem cells (ussc)- was incorporated in an attempt to expand cd34+ cells from ucb. to provide a similar environment in vitro, we coated ...

Abstract Recently, there has been significant progress in understanding reinforcement learning in Markov decision processes (MDP). We focus on improving Q-learning and analyze its sample complexity. We investigate the performance of tabular Q-learning, Approximate Q-learning and UCB-based Q-learning. We also derive a lower PAC bound Ω( |S| |A| 2 ln |A| δ ) of UCB-based Q-learning. Two tasks, Ca...

BACKGROUND Allogeneic blood for transfusion is in short supply in most parts of the developing world. Cord blood for transfusion can be a significant source of blood supply to our health institutions. AIMS This study aims to investigate the knowledge and attitude to the donation and use of umbilical cord blood (UCB) for transfusion among the patients receiving services in a tertiary health in...

Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) have the capabilities for self-renewal and differentiation into cells with the phenotypes of bone, cartilage, neurons and fat cells. These features of MSCs have attracted the attention of investigators for using MSCs for cell-based therapies to treat several human diseases. Because bone marrow-derived cells, which are a main source of MSCs, are not always acceptabl...