Empowered Patient Podcast Optimizing Blood and Cell Collection and Exchanges with Carly Newton Terumo Blood and Cell Technologies
Carly Newton is an apheresis expert at Terumo Blood and Cell Technologies, a medical device company that manufactures and designs systems that collect blood components and cells. Their software provides management tools to optimize procedures and help physicians better manage care. The largest patient group treated with red blood cell exchange are those with sickle cell disease and benefit from the Terumo iron-neutral therapy over a simple transfusion.
Carly explains, "We've also got software technologies that many of our blood banks use and they're designed to get the most from blood donors when they go and present at a blood bank. So, for instance, instead of a blood donor just donating a bag of whole blood, our software can actually look at the starting counts of these donors and recommend what the blood donation center should collect from that donor to get the optimal cells from that patient."
"The main goal of any transfusion therapy with sickle cell disease is to increase the oxygenation of the blood. There are different types of transfusion therapy and this is where we spend a lot of time educating physicians and patients on the different types of transfusion therapy. So probably the most common type of transfusion therapy for sickle cell patients in the US at the moment is something we call simple transfusions. And that's really sickle cell patients going into the hospital once or twice a month and having red cell infusions. The purpose of that is to increase the amount of healthy donor cells in these patients and increase oxygenation. "
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