No differences in colony formation of peripheral blood stem cells frozen with 5% or 10% dimethyl sulfoxide

High-dose chemotherapy with autologous stem cell rescue usually requires cryopreservation of the cells. For several years, 10% dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) has been used as the standard cryoprotectant. Because DMSO infusion can lead to toxic clinical complications in a dose-related manner, we wanted to evaluate if reduction to 5% DMSO would be possible. We have compared colony formation in the myeloid, erythropoietic, and megakaryocyte lineages in peripheral blood progenitor cell (PBPC) samples cryopreserved in parallel with 5% and 10% DMSO. Twenty-seven PBPC samples from patients with malignant diseases were investigated after 3 months of cryopreservation in liquid N(2), and samples from 14 of these patients were investigated after 1 year. A significantly higher colony formation was demonstrated for colony-forming units-erythrocyte (CFU-E) and CFU-granulocyte, erythrocyte, macrophage, megakaryocyte (GEMM) both at 3 months and at 1 year in the 5% samples. For CFU-granulocyte-macrophage (GM) and CFU-megakaryocyte (Mk) no significant difference was demonstrated neither at 3 months nor at 1 year in samples frozen with 5% and 10% DMSO. Also, there was a statistically significant correlation between the CFU-total and CFU-Mk-total, indicating that the CFU-total might be used as an evaluation of megakaryocyte progenitors. Viability testing with the Trypan Blue exclusion test showed that cells cryopreserved in 5% DMSO had significantly higher viability than the cells cryopreserved in 10% DMSO. We conclude that 5% DMSO is at least as good for cryopreservation of small-volume PBPC samples as the conventional 10% DMSO, and our results suggest that the possibility of using 5% DMSO for cryopreservation of autologous PBPC grafts should be further investigated in clinical studies.