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Bone Marrow Donors Can Be Hard to Find. One Company Is Turning to Cadavers
San Francisco–based Ossium Health has carried out three transplants for cancer patients using stem cells from deceased donors’ blood marrow in recent months.
“The issue is that it is difficult to find a fully matched donor for minorities,” says Muneer Abidi, an oncologist at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, who led the patient’s care. 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 whether the technique will be useful for cancer patients remains to be seen. Steven Devine, chief medical officer of NMDP, says one potential advantage of Ossium’s product is that it could reduce wait times for patients whose disease is so advanced that they need a transplant right away.
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