Evaluation of lymphocyte subpopulations in cord blood of Bulgarian newborns.

Background: Umbilical cord blood (UCB) is a clinically useful source of hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells for treatment of a wide variety of malignant and non-malignant disorders. An important way to completing infor- mation on the quality and composition of units for transplantation is more extensive immunophenotyping of UCB. Moreover, phenotyping of lymphocyte subpopulations is essential for the diagnosis and follow-up of children with immunodeficiencies and other immune disorders and therefore, establishment of age-matched reference values of lymphocyte subsets is a necessity for each population.

Characterization of mesenchymal stem cells isolated from the human umbilical cord.

Numerous papers have reported that mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) can be isolated from various sources such as bone marrow, adipose tissue and others. Nonetheless it is an open question whether MSCs isolated from different sources represent a single cell lineage or if cells residing in different organs are separate members of a family of MSCs. Subendothelial tissue of the umbilical cord vein has been shown to be a promising source of MSCs.