Every 27 seconds, someone in the world is diagnosed with a blood cancer or a blood disorder. Despite the growing donor pool, transplantation centers are still facing challenges: the search for an unrelated donor until the subsequent transplantation is a race against time. And even after an initial treatment, a further transplant may be needed, requiring another donation. A second donation is not a single case. Generally, about one in 30 donors donates stem cells for a second time, mostly for the same patient.

In either case – the faster a suitable donor is identified and the faster the hematopoietic stem cells reach the patient, the better the chance of survival. But even when a match is found, it can take up to 12 weeks before a transplantation takes place. This urgent need was the initial motivation for extending the activities to process and store Adult Donor Cryopreserved Units (ADCUs). These ADCUs should be accessible to transplantation centers and patients more quickly. If a suitable ADCU is already stored at the DKMS Stem Cell Bank, recipients will benefit from a full availability within a few days.

First ADCU transplantation

The first transplantation of such an ADCU from the DKMS Stem Cell Bank showed that this is not just theory. The patient received this ADCU as stem cell boost. The stem cell unit used was cryopreserved and stored at the time of the first transplantation. That the cells have already been available in the DKMS Stem Cell Bank had many advantages:

• the confirmatory typing and preliminary examination of the donor material had already been carried out
• only a few days passed between the request and the transplantation
• the shipment was extremely fast
• the ADCU arrived at the transplantation center in the appropriate quality
• the patient received the stem cell boost he needed as soon as possible
• the donor did not have to undergo the mobilization and apheresis process again, since a second donation was not necessary

From just a single collection, two stem cell grafts were obtained and both have now been used. The first milestone on the journey of the ADCUs has thus been reached. „The whole team in Dresden was very happy about this first stem cell transplantation from the DKMS Stem Cell Bank. The delivery process from the cryotank to the patient and the transplantation went smoothly, but now it's a matter of keeping our fingers crossed. We truly hope that the treatment will now have the desired effect,” said Dr. Alexander Platz, Medical Director of the DKMS Stem Cell Bank.

Read more about the advantages of ADCUs here.

At the moment, 100 ADCUs are already stored at the DKMS Stem Cell Bank in Dresden. The DKMS is now working on gradually increasing the number and rapidly building up the inventory.

How to request ADCUs?

If you are interested in requesting an ADCU, you should be able to find those at your local stem cell donor registry software (i.e. ZKRD in Germany) and via the DKMS Registry. Please use the request form “Formal Request for Adult Donor Cryopreserved Unit Shipment”, which is available for download here.