What we can learn from National and International Platelet Serology Workshops

Abstract

S INCE 1982, cooperative international, national, and regional platelet antibody workshops have taken place each year (Table 1). 1-15 The initiating event for commencement of workshops in 1981 was the creation of a Working Party on Platelet Serology (Inaugural Chairman, Professor A.E.G.Kr. yon dem Borne), by the ISBT/ISCH Expert Panel on Serology. This panel recognized the growing relevance of the new science of platelet serology in hematology and transfusion medicine. Today, platelet serology is widely used for both definitive diagnosis and longitudinal monitoring of patients with alloimmune thrombocytopenias such as fetomaternal alloimmune thrombocytopenia and post-transfusion immune platelet refractory states, in patients with primary and secondary autoimmune thrombocytopenias, including post-transfusion purpura, and for the study of drug-associated thrombocytopenias. 16 The fimeline in Table 1 plots the history of platelet workshop activity around the world. The organization and effort involved in the conduct and discussion of these workshops is considerable. Each regular platelet serology workshop represents a partiCipating membership of, on average, 17 laboratories (range, 12 to 29), with average test sample numbers per workshop in the region of 19 (range, 8 to 37). Most commonly, test samples comprise human antisera containing mono-specific platelet alloantibodies or mixtures of anti-HLA and anti-platelet specificities. Stabilized platelets for serological phenotyping by participants became a fashionable inclusion in the early 1990s, but more recently these have been supplanted by ethylenediaminetetra-acetic acid blood or purified DNA