ASH 2010 meeting report—Top 10 clinically oriented abstracts in transfusion medicine

Abstract

At the 2010 American Society of Hematology annual meeting held December 4-7, in Orlando, FL, USA. Fifty-five articles in the field of Transfusion Medicine comprised two oral and two poster sessions. In addition, one educational session and one scientific committee session in Transfusion Medicine were presented. As is the case for all abstracts submitted to the Society in the months preceding the meeting, the Transfusion Medicine articles were read and evaluated by a committee of experts in the field and ranked according to scientific merit and impact on practice. The articles scoring the highest in this evaluation were selected for oral and poster presentation. The following 10 articles were selected for summarization because they either represent potentially important breakthroughs in the evolution of a new direction in transfusion medicine (ex vivo production of blood cells for cellular and transfusion therapy) and/or contain information that is immediately relevant to clinical practice. Space constraints force the omission of many other impactful articles in the field, all of which, including those summarized here, are published in abstract form in the Society's journal Blood, Vol. 116 (21) [2]. The quantity of MSC needed for therapeutic use is thought to require large scale ex vivo expansion, and a number of protocols to achieve this have been published. In this study one-(1 passage) and two-(2 passages) step procedures were compared using either fetal calf serum (fcs) or human platelet lysate (hpl) to potentiate growth of MCS derived from normal adult bone marrow. The investigators demonstrated that the two-step protocol resulted in increased numbers of MCS (over 1.5 billion cells per mL of initial bone marrow seeded) and that hpl was superior to fcs in effecting MSC expansion. Evaluation of the cytokines/chemokines in the hpl found large amounts of PDGF-AB/BB, PDGF-AA, RANTES, sCD40L, GRO, sVCAM, and sICAM. The concentration of PDGF-AB/BB declined progressively in culture inversely proportional to the increase in the number of MSC while the remaining cytokines/chemokines were stable. Using an automated cell expansion system (CES) (Caridian BCT) they were able to further increase the yield of MCS while improving control of lactate, PDGF and glucose in the system. Eventual yields of >2.0 billion MCS/mL of initial bone marrow in under 3 weeks were achieved using animal free reagents. While the MSC remained phenotypically stable over one or two passages, experiments with prolonged culture of MSC with multiple passages resulted in phenotypic changes in the cells, sounding a note of caution and the need for standardization of ex vivo cell expansion techniques before their wide scale use in clinical medicine. No. 2: Chromatin Modifying Agents Promote the Ex Vivo Production of Functional Human Erythroid Progenitor Cells (Abstract # 340)Blood cells transfused today are for the most part mature cells with finite lifespan. In a new twist to the cellular therapy aspect of TM, these researchers sought to produce erythr...