“Latest Stem Cells News”

A blood sample databank under the China Marrow Donor Program (CMDP), was officially established Monday at Zhongguancun of Beijing.
The new databank is now the largest for Chinese people in the world, according to Hong Junling, deputy head of CMDP management center.

The databank includes information such as the names and gender of nearly one million donors and information about to which ethnic groups the donors come from, Hong said.
It also covers such medical information as blood types, gene types and health status of the donors.

The CMDP, launched in 2001 by the Red Cross Society of China, aims to help millions of Chinese with blood diseases.
But Hong said the blood sample databank could help genetic analysis for major diseases other than blood diseases.

The blood sample databank has collected 970,000 samples and provided more than 1,200 patients with haematogenous stem cells, including 50-odd cases from abroad, according to Hong.
The number of samples is expected to reach one million by 2010.

A 21-year-old leukemia patient underwent pioneering surgery in a Shanghai hospital Wednesday, when doctors transfused 30 milliliters of umbilical-cord blood donated by a Shanghai cord bank. Today they will transplant a batch of his father’s stem cells, which are an imperfect match.

This combination of umbilical-cord blood and half-matched stem cells can offer lifesaving transplant opportunities to many more patients than traditional methods, which require a perfect match between patient and donor, said doctors from Shanghai No. 1 People’s Hospital.

It will be a month before results of the transplant are determined.

About 40,000 to 50,000 people on China’s mainland are diagnosed with leukemia every year – alf of them children. Only about 1,000 are able to receive a stem-cell transplant because of the difficulty of finding a matching donor.

The chances of finding a perfectly matched donor are as little as one in 100,000, when direct blood-relatives are not available. The possibility of an exact match is one in four between immediate relatives.