Patients in the US have received a bone marrow transplant using umbilical cord blood expanded by a patented 'off-the-shelf' mesenchymal precursor cells (MPCs).
The first 18 patients who partipated in the trial are at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has funded treatment in up to 30 patients.
The trials are being conducted by Angioblast Systems, a US-based associate company for Mesoblast, an Australian company specialising in regenerative medicine.
The companies aim to develop a therapy that results in bone marrow reconstitution as effectively as unrelated adult bone marrow, but without the potentially life-threatening complication of graft-versus-host disease, which occurs in as many as 60% of patients.
The proprietary MPCs expanded haematopoietic stem cells in umbilical cord blood by approximately 40-fold.
In patients receiving MPC-expanded cord blood, the median time to neutrophil recovery was 16 days and to platelet recovery 38 days, compared with approximately 30 days and over 90 days, respectively, in published reports of patients transplanted with an unexpanded cord.
To date, only two patients have developed Grade III/IV graft-versus-host disease, compared with approximately 40% in published reports of patients transplanted with unexpanded cord blood.
The companies believe the technology has the potential to lower the risk of infections, bleeding, and death in critically ill patients with haematologic malignancies following chemotherapy.