“Today’s ecosystem is built around living volunteers,” says Ossium CEO and co-founder Kevin Caldwell. Although the U.S. organ donation system has been around for decades, bone marrow has never been routinely harvested from deceased donors in the same way as hearts, lungs, kidneys, and livers. No one had come up with an efficient way to obtain cells from deceased donors or cryopreserve them on a large scale so that they could be preserved until needed.
“Unlike solid organs, you can’t transplant bone marrow into the closest person of approximately the right size who needs it,” Caldwell says. “The genetics of the donor and recipient must be closely matched.”
The new method of harvesting stem cells through apheresis does not work well in deceased people because it relies on blood pressure. based on previous the study In research conducted at the University of Pittsburgh and Johns Hopkins University, Ossium developed a method to extract bone marrow from the spinal column, a part of the body that is not normally used. The company is partnering with a U.S. organ procurement organization to collect spinal columns from cadavers and transport them to the company’s facility in Indianapolis. There, bone marrow is extracted and cryopreserved in liquid nitrogen vapor at approximately -190 degrees Celsius.
Ossium has “processed thousands of donors” since its founding in 2016, Caldwell said (the bank’s exact number of donors is proprietary, Caldwell said). Ossium’s frozen bone marrow is currently being donated to a total of three people. Michigan woman. A fourth transplant is planned soon.
Robert Negrin, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and vice president of the American Society of Hematology, called the transplant “an important milestone,” but it remains to be seen whether the technology will help cancer patients. “We have other options that work pretty well,” he says, referring to partially matched donor transplants and cord blood transplants. “But there are always situations where something can slip through the cracks.”
Negrin believes that bone marrow transplants from deceased donors could help organ transplant patients. Organ transplant patients currently must take immunosuppressive drugs for the rest of their lives to prevent their immune systems from attacking the new organ. But because immune cells come from bone marrow, patients could theoretically be able to get off their immunosuppressants if they received a bone marrow transplant from the same donor, Negrin said.
