Dr. Karen Ballen received her MD at Dartmouth College and then completed an Internal Medicine internship and residency at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, and a Hematology/Oncology fellowship at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston. She has held several attending physician appointments including Transplant Physician, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Children's Hospital, Boston; Director, Bone Marrow Transplant Unit, UMass Memorial Health Care; and Acting Division Director, Medical Oncology, UMass Memorial Health Care. Dr. Ballen is currently a Full Professor in the Department of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and director of the leukemia program, Massachusetts General Hospital. Her research interests focus on novel therapies for leukemia and transplantation. A particular area of specialty is cord blood transplantation for those patients who do not have matched related or unrelated donors. Dr. Ballen’s research has focused on improving outcomes after cord blood transplantation, and she has led multiple clinical trials focusing on double cord blood transplantation in adults, cord blood homing strategies, graft vs. host disease prophylaxis and infection prophylaxis. She has authored more than 100 papers in this field.

• 1 Applications of Umbilical Cord Blood Derived Stem Cells in Vascular Medicine.- 2 Regenerative Potential of Cord Blood.- 3 Quality Control in Cord Blood Banking .- 4 Maternal HLA typing and Cord Blood Unit Choice.- 5 Optimizing Donor and Cord Blood Unit Selection for Banking and Transplantation.- 6 Cord Blood Transplantation for Pediatric Hematologic Malignancies: Indications, Mechanisms, and Outcomes.- 7 Results of Cord Blood Transplantation in Children with Non-Malignant Hematologic Conditions.- 8 Umbilical Cord Blood Transplantation for Inherited Metabolic Diseases.- 9 Myeloablative Single-Unit Cord Blood Transplantation in Adults.- 10 Quantitative and Qualitative Immune Reconstitution Following Umbilical Cord Blood Transplantation.- 11 Thymic Regeneration after Umbilical Cord Blood Transplantation: Mechanisms, Measurements and Implications on Anti-viral Immunity.- 12 Cord Blood Transplantation in the East Mediterranean Region.- 13 Targeting Homing to Enhance Engraftment following Umbilical Cord Blood Stem Cell Transplantation.- 14 Cord Blood Ex-Vivo Expansion.- 15 Intra-Bone Marrow Transplant of Cord Blood Cells: A Transplant approach that tries to Optimize Seeding Efficiency and Trafficking of Hematopoietic Stem Cells.- 16 Haplo Cord Transplantation : Overcoming the Limitations of Umbilical Cord Blood Transplantation.- 17 Studies Comparing Haploidentical and Cord Blood Transplantation.- 18 Comparison of Umbilical Cord Blood to Adult Related and Unrelated Donors.- 19 Disease Specific Analysis of Cord Blood Transplantation for Adults and Clinical Results of Single and Double Umbilical Cord Blood Transplantation.- 20 Selection of the Optimal Cord Blood Unit.

From the book reviews: "This is a compendium of expert reviews of advances in production and different clinical applications of umbilical cord blood-derived stem cells (UCBSC). The purpose is to describe contemporary practice for UCBSC production and clinical applications. The book meets these worthy objectives. ... This is a great resource for anyone involved in UCBSC production or transplantation." (Valerie L. Ng, Doody's Book Reviews, November, 2014)