Bone Marrow Donors Can Be Hard to Find. One Company Is Turning to Cadavers

“Today’s ecosystem is based astir surviving volunteers,” Ossium’s CEO and cofounder, Kevin Caldwell, says. While the US organ donor strategy has existed for decades, bony marrow has ne'er been regularly collected from those deceased donors successful the aforesaid mode that hearts, lungs, kidneys, and livers have. Nobody had travel up with an businesslike mode of obtaining the cells from deceased donors oregon cryopreserving them astatine standard truthful they tin beryllium stored until needed.

“Unlike a coagulated organ, you can’t conscionable transplant bony marrow into the nearest idiosyncratic who is astir the close size who needs it,” Caldwell says. “You truly person to person a adjacent familial lucifer betwixt the donor and the recipient.”

The caller method of stem compartment harvesting, via apheresis, doesn’t enactment good successful deceased radical due to the fact that it relies connected humor pressure. Based connected previous research conducted astatine the University of Pittsburgh and Johns Hopkins University, Ossium developed a mode to extract bony marrow from the spinal column, a portion of the assemblage that typically went unused. The institution has partnered with US organ procurement organizations to retrieve spinal columns from cadavers and vessel them to the company’s installation successful Indianapolis. There, bony marrow is extracted and cryopreserved successful liquid nitrogen vapor astatine astir –190 degrees Celsius.

Caldwell says Ossium has “processed thousands of donors” since the institution was founded successful 2016. (The nonstop fig of donors successful the slope is proprietary, helium says.) Ossium’s frozen bony marrow has present been fixed to 3 radical successful total, including the Michigan woman, with a 4th transplant scheduled soon.

Robert Negrin, a prof of medicine astatine Stanford University and vice president of the American Society of Hematology, calls the transplants an “important milestone,” but whether the method volition beryllium utile for crab patients remains to beryllium seen. “We person different options that enactment beauteous well,” helium says, referring to partially matched donor transplants and cord humor transplants. “But determination are ever situations that could autumn done the cracks.”

Negrin sees imaginable for deceased donor bony marrow transplants to assistance organ transplant patients, who presently indispensable instrumentality immunosuppressive drugs for the remainder of their lives to debar their immune strategy attacking the caller organ. But due to the fact that immune cells originate successful the bony marrow, if they could person a marrow transplant from the aforesaid donor, Negrin says patients could—in theory—go disconnected immunosuppressive drugs.