RSS
Healthcare: First stem cell bank in a public hospital
The first HSCs (haematopoietic stem cells) bank at the Fundeni Clinic Institute meets all the standards of the National Transplant Agency and the European standards regulating the activity of processing and preserving live cells.
'The stem cell bank is a special department totally devoted to processing and storing HSCs, providing an air quality in excess of 99 percent purity for the area where the preparation and validation of the medullary graft occurs,' institute manager, Doctor Carmen Orban, explained on Thursday, May 3.
The stem cells bank provides the conditions for the processing of the HSCs both for the patients who undergo a bone marrow transplant at the institute and to the voluntary donors whose stem cells are to be processed here.
'The creation of this bank comes as the national registry of the voluntary donors of HSCs is about to get finished, meaning the patients will have access to cells from unrelated people for the transplant, both from the National Registry and from the international registries interconnected to it,' Doctor Carmen Orban explained.
Processing HSCs under bank conditions is mandatory so as the cells collected in Romania could be sent through the registry to any bone marrow transplant centre abroad, where they can save lives.
'The stem cell bank within Fundeni Clinic Institute becomes an essential partner of the national registry of voluntary donors,' Doctor Carmen Orban said.
According to Fundeni Institute manager, it meets all the requirements to become the first public umbilical cord tissue bank in a public hospital.
'Meaning that in the future we will be able to get access to this source of stem cells for transplants,' Doctor Camen Orban said, Agerpres reports.