Clinical and laboratory comparison study of refrigerated and cryopreserved bone marrow for transplantation

Refrigerated storage for short-term preservation of bone marrow is an alternative to cryopreservation where chemotherapeutic regimens include drugs with short in vivo half-lives. We performed a clinical and laboratory comparison of bone marrow stored at 4 degrees C for up to 9 days to bone marrow cryopreserved at -90 degrees C for autotransplantation. After adjusting for the confounding effects of disease type or sex, no clinically meaningful variation in post-transplant course between refrigerated storage and cryopreserved was found. Therefore, the data presented in this study suggest that the clinical recovery indices following transplantation between the two storage groups are essentially equivalent. One potential advantage to refrigerated storage, however, is that it may provide an opportunity for extended exposure to growth factors and/or purging agents in vitro prior to transplantation. To prepare for an in vitro analysis of this hypothesis, we concentrated the stem cell population and compared the nucleated cell recovery, viability and colony forming potential following refrigerated storage of whole bone marrow and buffy coat to cryopreserved bone marrow stored for the same interval. While the nucleated cell recovery for cryopreserved marrow was significantly greater than for refrigerated storage, the viability and colony forming potential of the refrigerated storage was superior or equivalent, independent of prior processing.