“Today’s ecosystem relies on living volunteers,” says Ossium CEO and co-founder Kevin Caldwell. Although the U.S. organ donation system has existed for decades, bone marrow has never been regularly harvested from deceased donors in the same way as hearts, lungs, kidneys and livers. No one has figured out an effective way to obtain cells from deceased donors or to cryopreserve them on a immense scale so that they can be stored until needed.
“Unlike a solid organ, you can’t just transplant bone marrow into a close relative of approximately the right size who needs it,” Caldwell says. “A close genetic match between donor and recipient is really necessary.”
The modern method of collecting stem cells through apheresis does not work well in deceased people because it relies on blood pressure. Based on previous tests In a study conducted at the University of Pittsburgh and Johns Hopkins University, Ossium developed a method to extract bone marrow from the spine, a part of the body that usually goes unused. The company partnered with U.S. organ procurement organizations to recover the spine from the cadaver and send it to the company’s facility in Indianapolis. There, bone marrow is collected and cryopreserved in liquid nitrogen vapor at a temperature of approximately -190 degrees Celsius.
Caldwell says that since the company was founded in 2016, Ossium has “served thousands of donors.” (The exact number of donors in the bank is confidential, he says). Ossium’s frozen bone marrow has now been donated to a total of three people, including a Michigan woman who will soon be scheduled for a fourth transplant.
Robert Negrin, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and vice president of the American Society of Hematology, calls the transplants “an important milestone,” but it is unclear 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. “However, there are always situations that could end in failure.”
Negrin sees the potential for bone marrow transplants from deceased donors to lend a hand organ transplant patients who currently must take immunosuppressive drugs for the rest of their lives to avoid the immune system attacking the modern organ. However, Negrin argues that because immune cells are made in the bone marrow, if they could receive a bone marrow transplant from the same donor, patients could – theoretically – be off immunosuppressive drugs.