A donor must have closely matched genes for human leukocyte antigens, or HLA, to be considered compatible. “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. The team turned to Ossium Health, a San Francisco–based biotech startup that is collecting bone marrow from recently deceased organ donors, cryopreserving it, and building a bank of frozen bone marrow.
, the world’s largest bone marrow registry, can vary widely. Black or African American patients face the toughest odds, with just a 29 percent chance of finding a match, because the registry isn’t diverse enough. Collecting donor stem cells used to require surgically removing marrow from a bone, usually in the hip or sternum, with a needle and syringe.
, 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. has partnered with Ossium to run its early phase clinical trial. However, there’s some evidence that the freezing process can decrease the quality of stem cells and may slightly increase the risk of cancer relapse, so Devine says Ossium’s approach may be more suitable for other types of patients, such as those with sickle cell disease, for whom bone marrow transplants can be a cure. “Ultimately, the value and the demand will be determined by clinical research,” he says.