Harvest of the hematopoietic tissue

The donorship of the bone marrow implies complex and painful procedures, the potential donors are aware of their responsibility and importance of their participation in the events, so they almost never refuse from the procedure. In our work we have refused from the direct isolation of the bone marrow and isolate the cells and HPCs in the procedure of cytopheresis from the peripheral blood, which is safe and painless. We will describe it later. Here we will tell you about the standard protocol of the bone marrow isolation.

To isolate the hematopoietic tissue, the donor stays in a hospital for one day. A general anesthesia is given. The doctor uses special needles to puncture hip bones that contain a lot of bone marrow tissue. There can be a hundred or more punctures. For approximately two hours about a liter of the hematopoietic tissue is isolated. This tissue is able to give life to the recipient and provide them with a new organ of blood production. In case of the autologous transplantation, the obtained material is frozen. After the procedure of isolation, the donor may feel temporary pain in the sites of puncture but it is easily relieved with the pain-killers. The isolated hematopoietic tissue is replenished within two weeks.

The material for the cells transplantation is obtained in a different way, and we widely use it. For five days before isolation, the donor takes special drugs, growth factors, that induce migration of the cells to the blood vessels. Then the procedure of apheresis is performed, which can take up to five hours: the blood of the donor passes through a special machine that “filters” blood, selects personalised therapy and returns the rest blood back. During the apheresis, the machine processes up to 15 liters of blood, and about 200 ml of personalised therapy are received. The patient might feel some pain in the bones after the procedure of apheresis, which is associated with the stimulation and increase of the size of the bone marrow.