INCREASED QUALITASTIVE AND QUANTITATIVE REQUIREMENTS PUT ON HAEMATOPOIETIC CELL ESTABLISHMENTS AS THE RESULT OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC – OWN EXPERIENCE

摘要

The haematopoietic cell establishment of the Tissue Establishment of the University Hospital Hradec Kralove(EU TE Code CZ000426) has been providing cryopreserved haematopoietic progenitor cell (HPCs)concentrates for autologous transplantation and cryopreserved donor lymphocytes (DLI) used after allogeneictransplantations for several decades. The total of 140 - 220 autologous cryopreserved HPC units and 20 - 79cryopreserved DLI 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 inthe donor and the preparation of the patient for transplantation was not possible. At the beginning of theCOVID-19 pandemic in spring 2020 the fluent transport of allogeneic HPC grafts in the global scale wasjeopardized by restrictions of crossing the state borders. In the European Union this threat was prevented bythe decision of the European Commission to give the transport of substances of human origin (SOHO), suchas organs and viable cells for transplantation the absolute priority. In the same time the European Group forBone Marrow and Blood Transplantation (EMBT) issued a recommendation to cryopreserve all importedallogeneic HPC concentrates to prevent the COVID-19 transmission. This recommendation was suspendedafter the decline of the first wave of the pandemic and was restarted in September 2020 as the result of impairedepidemiological situation. Cryopreservation was performed by us in 14 unrelated HPC collections, countriesof origin were Czech Republic (n = 3), FRG (n = 7), Poland (n = 2), Switzerland (n = 1), Turkey (n = 1) andin 5 related HPC collections in the year 2020. All cryopreserved HPC concentrates were found suitable forclinical application and the total of 111 units were transplanted. The total number of cryopreserved HPC unitstransplanted in 2020 including 205 autologous ones was 316, which is approximately 200 % of the number ofunits transplanted in the previous year 2019.