Abstract
In line with current microbial risk reduction efforts, pathogen inactivation (PI) technologies for blood components promise to reduce the residual risk of known and emerging infectious agents. The implementation of PI of labile blood components is slowly but steadily increasing. This review discusses the relevance of PI for the field of transfusion medicine and describes the available and emerging PI technologies that can be used to treat cellular blood products such as platelet and red blood cell units. In collaboration with the French medical device manufacturer Macopharma, the German Red Cross Blood Services developed a new UVC light-based PI method for platelet units, which is currently being investigated in clinical trials.
Highlights
From the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, contaminated hemophilia blood products were a serious public health problem, resulting in the infection of large numbers of hemophiliacs with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)
If safety measures had been implemented in a timely and consistent manner after identification of the acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) epidemic in 1981 and isolation of the HIV in 1983, the transmission of HIV infection by these blood products could have been prevented in most cases
These data clearly show that the use of chemical agents for pathogen inactivation (PI) of cellular products increases the risk of immune responses against blood components in transfusion recipients
Summary
Received: 26 September 2017 Accepted: 20 November 2017 Published: 04 December 2017. In line with current microbial risk reduction efforts, pathogen inactivation (PI) technologies for blood components promise to reduce the residual risk of known and emerging infectious agents. The implementation of PI of labile blood components is slowly but steadily increasing. This review discusses the relevance of PI for the field of transfusion medicine and describes the available and emerging PI technologies that can be used to treat cellular blood products such as platelet and red blood cell units. In collaboration with the French medical device manufacturer Macopharma, the German Red Cross Blood Services developed a new UVC light-based PI method for platelet units, which is currently being investigated in clinical trials
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