Fig. 2

Umbilical cord blood collecting, processing, and banking: basic steps. In brief, once the umbilical cord blood extraction kit (temperature-insulated and padded for safety during transport) arrives at the processing laboratory, the blood bag’s external surfaces are disinfected prior to entrance in Cleanroom type B. Here, under highly sterile conditions, a pre-cryopreserved cell suspension enriched with mononuclear cells is collected following hydroxyethyl starch-based sedimentation of red blood cells (RBCs) and centrifugation. The resultant cell product is finally cryopreserved in a freezing bag cassette following a controlled-rate freezing process to slowly reduce the temperature to −180 °C and is stored in commercially available liquid nitrogen dewars. Routinely, quality controls based on the estimation of total nucleated cells (TNCs), percentage of CD34⁺ and CD45⁺ cells, and cell viability are performed throughout sample processing. The figure was designed and hand-drawn by CG-M