“For months, doctors in Michigan had been searching for a bone marrow donor for a 68-year-old African American patient. She had been treated for acute myeloid leukemia once before, but the fast-growing blood cancer came back. A bone marrow transplant, in which healthy donor stem cells replace a patient’s unhealthy marrow, was her best chance at survival.

A donor must have closely matched genes for human leukocyte antigens, or HLA, to be considered compatible. ‘The issue is that it is difficult to find a fully matched donor for minorities,’ says Muneer Abidi, an oncologist at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, who led the patient’s care.

The team turned to Ossium Health, a San Francisco–based biotech startup that is collecting bone marrow from recently deceased organ donors, cryopreserving it, and building a bank of frozen bone marrow. The company’s aim is to create an ‘off-the-shelf’ treatment that can be readily deployed for patients who desperately need a transplant.”

From Wired.