Transplantation of umbilical cord blood-derived endothelial progenitor cells: a promising method of therapeutic revascularisation

Therapeutic neovascularisation by endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs) mediated vascular regeneration is becoming a novel option for the treatment of ischaemic diseases. Recently, human umbilical cord blood (CB) has been found to contain a large number of EPCs and transplantation of CB EPCs led to a successful salvage of the ischaemic limbs through improvement in blood perfusion, indicating the feasibility of using CB cells for therapeutic revascularisation. This review will summarise recent studies in therapeutic revascularisation using CB cells and discuss the potential clinical utilisation of CB cells in ischaemic diseases.