“Today's ecosystem is based on living volunteers,” says Kevin Caldwell, CEO and co-founder of Ossium. While the US organ donor system has been in existence for decades, bone marrow from those deceased donors has never been routinely collected in the same way as heart, lungs, kidneys and liver. No one has devised an effective way to obtain cells from deceased donors or to cryopreserve them on a large scale so that they can be stored until needed.
“Unlike a solid organ, you can't just transplant bone marrow into the nearest person who is almost the right size to someone who needs it,” says Caldwell. “You have to have a really close genetic match between the donor and the recipient.”
The new method of stem cell harvesting through apheresis does not work well in dead people because it depends on blood pressure. based on Of earlier Research Conducted at the University of Pittsburgh and Johns Hopkins University, Ossium developed a way to extract bone marrow from the spinal column, a part of the body that typically remains unused. The company has partnered with US organ procurement organizations to recover spinal columns from cadavers and ship them to the company's facility in Indianapolis. There, the bone marrow is extracted and cryopreserved in liquid nitrogen vapor at approximately -190 °C.
Caldwell says Ossium has “processed thousands of donors” since the company's founding in 2016. Woman from Michigan, who is soon going to have her fourth transplant.
Robert Negrin, professor of medicine at Stanford University and vice president of the American Society of Hematology, calls the transplant an “important milestone,” but whether the technology will be useful to cancer patients remains to be seen. “We have other options that work very well,” he says, referring to partially matched donor transplants and umbilical cord blood transplants. “But there are always situations where a rift can occur.”
Negrin sees the potential for deceased donor bone marrow transplants to help organ transplant patients, who currently have to take immunosuppressive drugs for the rest of their lives to keep their immune systems from attacking the new organ. But because the immune cells originate in the bone marrow, if they can receive a marrow transplant from the same donor, Negrin says patients could theoretically go off immunosuppressive drugs.