Stem Cells, Umbilical Cord Blood Banking and Transplantation

2886 Words6 Pages

Nowadays, there are many alternatives or any other methods to improve the healthcare especially in a transplantation world. There are few choices available for the people today such as the embryonic stem cells, bone marrow stem cells, peripheral blood cell and the most new is the umbilical cord blood. The umbilical cord blood (UCB) defined by Chima and Mamdoo (2011, p. 79) as the blood which taken from the cut umbilical cord attached to the placenta of a newborn baby after a delivery. It been stated (Chima and Mamdoo 2011, p. 79) that the cord derived from the allantois have a rich source of multipotent stem cells, including the CD34+ , CD38- and haematopoietic progenitor cells. This shows that the cord blood could be more potential as the bone marrow cell in the patients with the haematological or non-haematological problems. The first successful umbilical cord transplantation done was in 1989 in a child with a Fanconi’s anemia and since then, the growth or demand for the cord blood increased. As we can see, this contributed to a major reason for the need of umbilical cord blood donation, storage, processing, freezing, and releasing of cord blood to the patient. Thus, establishment of the cord blood bank (CBB) because of the demand increased (Ballen 2010, p. 8). As mentioned by Ballen (2005, p. 3786), the first establishment of cord blood bank was in the early 1990s in New York, Milan, and Dusseldorf. The storage of the cord blood could last for about 15 years (Fadel 2006, p. 1). The point is that there are many ethical and legal issues raised by this CBB that need clarification and justification like the informed consent, ownership and property rights, collection of cord blood, and public CBB vs private CBB.

As mentioned earlier, there are issues on informed consent but what is actually the informed consent is all about and what is the thing that need to be considered for this cord blood banking. Firstly, what is mean by informed consent is the permission given from someone of one behalf to another behalf. According to Petrini (2010, p. 140), there were some kinds of elements of process leading to informed consent found by Beauchamp and Childress. The first one is the threshold elements (preconditions) which to understand and decide. Second, the information element, which means to make things clear or clarify the information given, the good recommendation of plan and to understand the previous elements.

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