“The current ecosystem is based on living volunteers,” says Kevin Caldwell, CEO and co-founder of Ossium. While the U.S. organ donation system has been around for decades, bone marrow has never been regularly harvested from those deceased donors in the same way that hearts, lungs, kidneys and livers are. No one had thought of an efficient way to obtain cells from deceased donors or cryopreserve them at scale so they could be stored until needed.
“Unlike a solid organ, you can’t just transplant bone marrow to the nearest person who is roughly the right size and needs it,” Caldwell says. “There really needs to be a close genetic compatibility between the donor and the recipient.”
The new method of collecting stem cells, through apheresis, does not work well in deceased people because it depends on blood pressure. based on former investigation Conducted at the University of Pittsburgh and Johns Hopkins University, Ossium developed a way to extract bone marrow from the spine, a part of the body that is not normally used. The company has partnered with American 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 about –190 degrees Celsius.
Caldwell says Ossium has “processed thousands of donors” since the company was founded in 2016. (The exact number of donors in the bank is proprietary, he says.) Ossium’s frozen bone marrow has now been delivered to three people in total, including the Michigan woman, whose fourth transplant is planned soon.
Robert Negrín, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and vice president of the American Society of Hematology, calls the transplants an “important milestone,” but it remains to be seen whether the technique will be useful for cancer patients. “We have other options that work quite well,” he says, referring to partially matched donor transplants and umbilical cord blood transplants. “But there are always situations that could go unnoticed.”
Negrín sees potential in bone marrow transplants from deceased donors to help organ transplant patients, who currently must take immunosuppressive medications for the rest of their lives to prevent their immune system from attacking the new organ. But because immune cells originate in the bone marrow, if they could receive a marrow transplant from the same donor, Negrín says patients could, in theory, stop taking immunosuppressive medications.