Rapid review: next generation of cord blood banks; transplantation and beyond.

Cord blood (CB) is a medicinal product of human origin with unique cellular properties such as the presence of multipotent stem cells, naive immune cells, and fetal blood components. CB transplantation provides high rate of donor chimerism, and a good balance of graft-versus-host (GVH) and graft-versus-leukemia (GVL) effects. Use of CB for transplantation has decreased in recent years as haplo-identical stem cell transplants have achieved similar short-term clinical outcomes. For most patients, however, the optimal stem cell source remains unclear. CB inventories can be used as a starting material to develop new cellular medicines, and units with low cellular content can be converted to produce blood components like platelet-rich plasma and red blood cell (RBC) units for special indications.