Interview to the Hindu NDTV

Dr. Samuel Abraham, Director, NCRM, Chennai gave an interview to the HINDU NDTV, where he insisted the need for a large pool of Cord Blood Public Bank in India.

"Cord Blood stem cells have been used in the clinical settings for the past 30 years instead of Bone Marrow. So if you take the statistics probably hundreds of thousands of patients in India suffer from Blood cancer. For the Blood cancer you need to first knockout the cancer cells using chemotherapy or radiotherapy. After doing that, to replace the blood forming system of the patient, which has been knocked off, you need to use either a matched bone marrow or a matched cord blood. So this match means we call it as a HLA match. The HLA matched Bone marrow if it is not available, we can go for a cord blood. That is when the Cord Blood which we are otherwise throwing away as a discarded waste or biomedical waste we can use it to treat the patients provided it is matching. So that is why I always say we need a very large pool of cord blood into a public bank"

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