When your baby is born, you don't know whether he or she will grow up to be a doctor or a clerk...a housewife or a musician...a model or a sportsman...or whatever.
Well, that's a bit like a stem cell. It starts life as a blank 'master cell', but it has the ability to transform into all the other cells that make up our body. Like blood, nerve and tissue cells.
Stem cells are found throughout your body, in bone marrow, peripheral blood (circulating in your veins) and in umbilical cord blood and tissue.
Over the last 20 years, exciting developments have taken place using umbilical cord blood - a particularly rich source of stem cells - to treat thousands of people, many of them children, for an ever increasing variety of medical conditions.
What are Stem Cells?
Stem cells are regarded as the 'building blocks' or master cells of the blood and immune system.
Stem Cells are very "clever" and can develop into many different types of cell within the body. They can be seen as a sort of repair system for the body, where a stem cell (or progenitor cell) has the potential to become a new type of cell with a more specialized function, such as a heart muscle cell to repair damaged heart muscle.
Stem cells are the "building blocks" of the blood and immune system
Over the past 20 years and in over 20.000 transplantations stem cells have helped treat many life-threatening illnesses by 'repairing' the damaged parts of the body . In addition to the standard medical treatments where cord blood stem cells are routinely used, ongoing research is continuously focused in finding new uses for stem cells. For example, Researchers at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) and the Institute of Child Health (ICH) have found encouraging evidence that blood-borne stem cells can be used to make lung cells in the body.
Cord blood stem cells ARE NOT the same as embryonic stem cells: they are similar to bone marrow stem cells.
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