Grzegorz Hensler: How Apheresis Transformed Blood Cell Separation and Collection
Grzegorz Hensler, Medical Doctor at Fundacja DKMS, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“So we managed to make hematopoietic stem cells leave the bone marrow and enter peripheral blood.
Now we need a way to collect them.
Enter: apheresis.
And here is another fascinating story: in 1962, the 17-year old son of George Judson, an IBM engineer, was diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia. During his son’s treatment at the National Cancer Institute, Judson saw how laborious the process of separating blood cells was. Being an engineer, he thought there had to be a better way.
Together with leukemia researcher Emil Freireich, he started working on a machine that could continuously take blood from a patient, separate selected blood cells by centrifugation and return the remaining blood components.
By 1963, they had a working prototype of continuous-flow blood cell separator. The 1970s and 1980s brought new generations of blood cell separators, increasingly used for both therapeutic and collection apheresis.
A technology developed to help patients with leukemia had given us a way to efficiently separate and collect cells from blood.
But nobody had designed it to specifically collect mobilized hematopoietic stem cells from healthy donors.
Not yet.”
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