It's not really bone marrow donation anymore

I'm just waiting on that call. I can vaguely remember representatives from the National Marrow Donner Program coming to visit my college. They shuffled a group of the premed and science majors in the student center to learn about the technology behind bone marrow donation and the wonderful gift of being a donor. See, the whole purpose of extracting bone marrow, or spongy material found inside of bone, was to collect the immature stem cells which have the potential to then differentiate into red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets. It is these cells that can be transplanted into patients with dysfunctional bone marrow or whose blood cells have been damaged due to diseases such as leukemias. I think I remember flashes of photos of families and children who had benefited from bone marrow transplants. They had me hooked and my name and information on a clipboard.

So, I'm just waiting to hear that I am a match for someone in need of a bone marrow transplant. I have to say that I wondered if I really should be a donor. They told us back then that if you are contacted to be a donor, it would require a couple of days of hospital stay and minor surgery to draw marrow from the hipbone. No wonder donors were so hard to find.

Apparently, now there is a newer and less complicated procedure to aid in easier donation. The most common method of donation now is by filtering of whole blood so bone marrow is not even involved. Instead of collecting bone marrow, donor are commonly injected once a day for four or five days with filgrastim (Neupogen, Amgen), a grangulocyte colony-stimulation factor, before donation. This is given in order to stimulate while blood cell maturation. Though filgrastim may cause mild-to-moderate bone pain and some skin reaction at the injection site, the drug is relatively safe. After it is determined that the donor has an optimal amount of stem cells circulating in the bloodstream, the actual peripheral blood stem cell donation occurs through a process called apheresis. The blood is drawn out of the arm and passed through an apparatus that separates blood constituents and stem cells are collected. The rest of the blood is return into circulation through the opposite arm. Sounds easy enough, right?

Reference:
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/bone-marrow/CA00047