Bone marrow donors can be difficult to find. One company is turning to carcasses

“Today's ecosystem is based on living volunteers,” said Kevin Caldwell, CEO and co-founder of Ossium. Although the U.S. organ donor system has been in place for decades, bone marrow has never been regularly collected from those deceased donors in the same way that hearts, lungs, kidneys and livers have been. No one had devised an efficient way to obtain cells from deceased donors or cryopreserve them on a large scale so that they can be stored until needed.

Ossium CEO and co-founder Kevin Caldwell.

Photo: Chris Whonsetler

“Unlike a solid organ, you can't just transplant bone marrow to the nearest person who is about the right size and needs it,” Caldwell says. “You really need to have a close genetic match between donor and recipient.”

The new method of harvesting stem cells, via apheresis, does not work well in deceased people because it depends on blood pressure. Based on last research Ossium, conducted at the University of Pittsburgh and Johns Hopkins University, developed a way to extract bone marrow from the spinal column, a part of the body that typically went unused. The company works with U.S. organ procurement organizations to recover spinal columns from cadavers and ship them to the company's factory in Indianapolis. There, bone marrow is extracted and cryopreserved in liquid nitrogen vapor at approximately -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 to the bank, he says.) Ossium's frozen bone marrow has now been given to a total of three people , including the Michigan woman, with a fourth transplant planned soon.

Robert Negrin, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and vice president of the American Society of Hematology, called the transplants an “important milestone,” but whether the technique will be useful for cancer patients remains to be seen. “We have other options that work quite well,” he says, referring to partially matched donor transplants and cord blood transplants. “But there are always situations that can fall through the cracks.”

Negrin sees potential for bone marrow transplants from deceased donors to help organ transplant patients, who currently must take immunosuppressants 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 patients could receive a bone marrow transplant from the same donor, Negrin says they could theoretically go off immunosuppressants.