Increased qualitative and quantitative requirements put on haematopoietic cell establishments as the result of the covid-19 pandemic - own experience
Abstract
The haematopoietic cell establishment of the Tissue Establishment of the University Hospital Hradec Králové (EU TE Code CZ000426) has been providing cryopreserved haematopoietic progenitor cell (HPCs) concentrates for autologous transplantation for several decades. The total of 140 - 220 autologous cryopreserved HPC units per year were delivered for clinical application in the years 2015 - 2019.
Cryopreservation of allogeneic HPCs was limited to rare cases, in which coordination of the HPC harvest in the donor and the preparation of the patient for transplantation was not possible. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic the fluent transport of allogeneic HPC grafts in the global scale was jeopardized by restrictions of crossing the state borders.
For this reason, the European Commission gave the transport of substances of human origin (SOHO) the absolute priority. In the same time the European Group for Bone Marrow and Blood Transplantation (EMBT) issued a recommendation to cryopreserve all allogeneic HPC concentrates.
Cryopreservation was performed by us in 14 unrelated HPC collections, countries of origin were Czech Republic (n = 3), FRG (n = 7), Poland (n = 2), Switzerland (n = 1), Turkey (n = 1) and in 5 related HPC collections in the year 2020. All cryopreserved HPC concentrates were found suitable for clinical application and the total of 111 units were transplanted.
The total number of cryopreserved HPC units transplanted in 2020 including 205 autologous ones was 316, which is approximately 200 % of the number of units transplanted in the previous year 2019.