Factors which can influence the quality related to cell viability of the umbilical cord blood units

Cell viability is an important indicator for the quality of umbilical cord blood (UCB) units that can influence the transplant final outcome. Thus, it is particularly important to identify the factors that may affect the cell quality during the banking process. The present study is a first attempt to correlate the impact of exogenous factors (time from collection to processing, collected UCB volume) and endogenous factors (TNCC – total nucleated cell count, CD34+cell count) on cell viability assessed before UCB units cryopreservation within a banking standardized process. Three thousand UCB units collected in 35 ml CPDA containing bags were processed by HES sedimentation within 48 h. TNCC, CD34+ cell counts and total cell viability were determined after processing. Cell viability of 94.37 ± 4.67%, TNCC of 73.17 ± 36.73 × 107 and CD34+cell count of 2.61 ± 2.29 × 106 was obtained after processing of units with UCB collected volume of 80.23 ± 28.52 ml. A significant negative correlation was found between cell viability and the time from collection to processing (r = –0.7228; P < 0.0001). The cell viability decreasing rate of 20.54%, 15.18% and 3–10% were achieved for units with collected UCB volume <40 ml, (40–80 ml) and >80 ml, to 48 h versus 12 h. There were no differences considering cell viability for the UCB units with similar collected UCB volume that had various CD34+cell count or TNCC (P > 0.05). The extension of the time from collection to processing of UCB units can reduce the quality by decreasing cell viability. The cell viability decreasing rate owing to the time influence is determined by the collected UCB volume being inversely proportional to it. Endogenous factors do not affect the cell viability.