Femoral Heads from Total Hip Arthroplasty as a Source of Adult Hematopoietic Cells

Normal human bone marrow cells are critical for studies of hematopoiesis and as controls to assess toxicity. As cells from commercial vendors are expensive, many laboratories resort to cancer-free bone marrow specimens obtained during staging or to umbilical cord blood cells, which may be abnormal or reflect a much younger age group compared to the disease samples under study. We piloted the use of femoral heads as an alternative and inexpensive source of normal bone marrow. Femoral heads were obtained from 21 successive patients undergoing elective hip arthroplasty. Mononuclear cells (MNCs) were purified with Ficoll, and CD3+, CD14+, and CD34+ cells were purified with antibody-coated microbeads. The median yield of MNCs was 8.95 × 107 (range, 1.62 × 105-2.52 × 108), and the median yield of CD34+ cells was 1.40 × 106 (range, 3.60 × 105-9.90 × 106). Results of downstream applications including qRT-PCR, colony-forming assays, and ex vivo proliferation analysis were of high quality and comparable to those obtained with standard bone marrow aspirates. We conclude that femoral heads currently discarded as medical waste are a cost-efficient source of bone marrow cells for research use.