Platelet Product Is Safe and Readily Available

The Acrodose PLus system enables blood centers and hospitals to use the abundant but often discarded source of platelets. Using a platform of complementary products, blood collection facilities can produce a therapeutic dose of whole blood-derived platelets from whole blood donations whenever they are needed.

Acrodose platelets benefit patients who require life-saving platelets for treatment of cancer, leukemia, blood disorders, bone marrow or organ transplants, accident, burn, or trauma as well as blood collection facilities that collect, pool, and test the platelets, and the hospitals that transfuse them. Hospital and blood centers will be able to efficiently and conveniently provide optimal blood products, not waste valuable whole blood donations, and achieve this without adding to their costs.

Pall Corp. (East Hills, NY, USA) introduced, together with the expanded Acrodose PLus system, a new approach that makes universal blood collection possible. The new technologies were showcased at the American Association of Blood Banks (AABB; www.aabb.org) annual meeting for transfusion medicine in Anaheim (CA, USA) in October 2007. The expanded use of the Acrodose PLus with all collection systems is especially valuable for blood centers that cannot currently change their established blood processing practices due to procedural or contractual obligations, validation, and other requirements. The system enables all blood centers--no matter what type of collection system they currently employ--to provide patients with transfusion-ready, therapeutic dose, high quality whole-blood-derived platelets.

Both plasma and platelets are precious blood components and are becoming increasingly more valuable with the institution of new restrictions on the donor pool to reduce potentially fatal diseases such as TRALI (transfusion-related acute lung injury). Additionally, platelets, whose main function is to aid in clotting, have a very short life span (five to seven days prior to being discarded).

When collections are made, especially by mobile units, blood centers guess which blood components are most needed by hospitals for their patients--red cells, plasma, and/or platelets--and set up their collections accordingly. But the demand for blood components can change daily, sometimes hourly, depending upon circumstances or emergencies. By using the new Acrodose PLus system with the Pall Leukotrap RC system and RC2D filter, much of that guesswork is eliminated. Together they enable blood collection facilities to collect whole blood with one universal collection and filtration system and make the determination of which components to process after they return--closer to real time when the hospital orders their blood components based on actual patient needs.

After collection, based on actual needs, blood centers can choose to process the donated blood in one of two ways. The first way is to manufacture red cells and plasma. In this case, the Leukotrap RC system with RC2D filter provides for more that 10% additional plasma than traditional whole-blood collection systems. The alternative option is to process some of the donated blood into non-leukocyte reduced platelets, a conventional amount of plasma, as well as red cells. In this case, the non-leukoreduced platelets can then also be processed with the Acrodose PLus to make an Acrodose Platelet.


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