A short spoken excerpt asserting that even a ‘perfectly matched’ bone marrow transplant can cause rejection because matching is limited to known markers, whereas completely unmatched umbilical cord blood (young stem cells) may cause less rejection than older, matched bone marrow—used to illustrate biological complexity and differences between young versus old stem cells.
Do you know that even a perfectly matched bone marrow can actually cause rejection? So that's perfectly matched. It's just perfectly matched to our knowledge. Right. For all the markers that we can tell. But life is so vast and so complex, you can't match them all. Right. You can't match 100%. So there's a chance of rejection. Yet when you use cells extracted from the umbilical cord blood, which is very similar in composition to the bone marrow, completely unmatched, there is a less chance of rejection than perfectly matched bone marrow transplant. So that's how different young versus old.
