Many patients who need transplant do not have matching donors in the registry. They are commonly offered umbilical cord blood transplantation, where stem cells are isolated from the umbilical cord blood of newborns. Other centers use grafts from partially matched related donors, so-called haplo-identical transplants.

In a procedure largely developed at our center, we use a combination of haplo-identical and umbilical cord blood cells. In a paper recently published in the journal Haematologica, we show how haplo-cord transplants recipients have considerably better outcomes when compared with double cord transplant recipients.

Van Besien et al, Reduced intensity haplo plus single cord transplant compared to double cord transplant: improved engraftment and survival free of progression and GVHD (GRFS), Haematologica,  February 2016