“Today’s ecosystem is based around living volunteers,” Ossium’s CEO and cofounder, Kevin Caldwell, says. Whereas the US organ donor system has existed for many years, bone marrow has by no means been frequently collected from these deceased donors in the identical manner that hearts, lungs, kidneys, and livers have. No one had provide you with an environment friendly manner of acquiring the cells from deceased donors or cryopreserving them at scale to allow them to be saved till wanted.
“Unlike a solid organ, you can’t just transplant bone marrow into the nearest person who is roughly the right size who needs it,” Caldwell says. “You really have to have a close genetic match between the donor and the recipient.”
The brand new technique of stem cell harvesting, by way of apheresis, doesn’t work effectively in deceased individuals as a result of it depends on blood strain. Primarily based on earlier analysis carried out on the College of Pittsburgh and Johns Hopkins College, Ossium developed a technique to extract bone marrow from the spinal column, part of the physique that sometimes went unused. The corporate has partnered with US organ procurement organizations to get well spinal columns from cadavers and ship them to the corporate’s facility in Indianapolis. There, bone marrow is extracted and cryopreserved in liquid nitrogen vapor at about –190 levels Celsius.
Caldwell says Ossium has “processed thousands of donors” because the firm was based in 2016. (The precise variety of donors within the financial institution is proprietary, he says.) Ossium’s frozen bone marrow has now been given to 3 individuals in whole, together with the Michigan girl, with a fourth transplant scheduled quickly.
Robert Negrin, a professor of drugs at Stanford College and vice chairman of the American Society of Hematology, calls the transplants an “important milestone,” however whether or not the method might be helpful for most cancers sufferers stays to be seen. “We have other options that work pretty well,” he says, referring to partially matched donor transplants and twine blood transplants. “But there are always situations that could fall through the cracks.”
Negrin sees potential for deceased donor bone marrow transplants to assist organ transplant sufferers, who at present should take immunosuppressive medication for the remainder of their lives to keep away from their immune system attacking the brand new organ. However as a result of immune cells originate within the bone marrow, if they may obtain a marrow transplant from the identical donor, Negrin says sufferers might—in concept—go off immunosuppressive medication.
