Cord blood: The building blocks of regenerative medicine

Stem cells can cure only blood-related diseases, so why there is a rush to save babies' cord blood?

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Dr Rahul Bhargava

Last Updated : Mar 28 2017 | 12:58 AM IST

From being discarded as waste at the time of a baby’s delivery to being recognised as a repository of stem cells and the building blocks of regenerative medicine, the cord blood and tissue has come a long way.

In the late 1980s, a decade when all sorts of exciting things were happening in the world of medicine, physicians discovered that cord blood contained stem cells. The exact use of these cells were ascertained a few years later, with their successful transplant into the body of a child suffering from Fanconi anaemia, a rare genetic disease. The source of cord blood stem

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