Cordonal blood (CB) is today recognized as a potentially important source of hematopoietic stem cells (SCs) for allogeneic transplantation, and to this task it would be of extreme importance to have the possibility of using cryopreserved CB units. Hence we investigated whether freezing and thawing alter the viability of CB hematopoietic cells. Mononuclear cells, recovered from fresh CB units by density-gradient centrifugation, were partly frozen and then thawed and partly immediately utilized for clonogenic tests. The cells were cultured in H4330 (C group) or H4434 (H4330 added with SC clonogenic growth factors) (C+ group) semisolid media added or not with serum-free Dulbecco modified Eagle medium (DMEM/sf). Cells seeded on H4330 were exposed to the conditioned supernatants from two human-embryo liver cell lines, which have been previously found to stimulate clonal growth of fresh CB hematopoietic cells. As expected, the number of colony-forming units (CFU) was higher in C+ than C group, and was not influenced by the addition of DMEM/sf. CFU number was higher in cryopreserved than fresh cells in both C and C+ culture groups. Conditioned supernatants from both cell lines stimulated clonal growth in both fresh and cryopreserved cell cultures. These findings indicate that cryopreservation and thawing do not alter the viability of CB SCs, but, on the contrary, improve their basal and cytokine-stimulated clonal growth, probably by negatively selecting SCs among the mononuclear CB cell population.

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