Assessing the HLA diversity of cord blood units collected from a birth clinic caring for pregnant women in an ethnically diverse metropolitan area.

Background: New strategies are emerging in cord blood banking where focusing on birth clinics caring for a high number of mothers belonging to ethnic minorities could offer new possibilities for allotransplantation both for patients of European origin and for patients from ethnic minorities or mixed ancestries.

Study Design And Methods: Marseilles Cord Blood Bank works with one university birth clinic caring for a culturally and sociologically diverse population. Stringent French legal restrictions apply to recording the geographic origin of parents.

[Perception by cancer patients of biomedical research in the era of large-scale biobanking].

In French hospitals, patients are increasingly asked to participate in research, particularly in oncology where the development of research is stimulated at a national level (plan Cancer). This article express our thoughts based on the literature about the perception by cancer patients of research activities developed in the care centre where they are treated. We focus mainly on the consent for biobanking in a context in which cancer patients are routinely requested to donate tumour samples for research.