Patient to Patient

Most blood donors are selected for their good health and their freedom from sickness that might be passed along in a transfusion. Dr. Charles Gordon Zubrod of the National Cancer Institute has been looking for donors suffering from one form of leukemia and using their blood to treat victims of other forms of the disease. In another feat of hematology, blood from healthy donors is helping to save some leukemia victims from bleeding to death.

In neither case, Dr. Zubrod told the Association of Military Surgeons last week, is whole blood used; only fractions are needed. In some cases the remainder can be returned to the donor's veins so that his supply is scarcely depleted, and he can act as a donor again within a few days.

100 Billion Cells. In the acute leukemia of childhood, drugs given to fight the cancer also cut down resistance to infection. One common infection, Dr. Zubrod said, exerts its deadly effects because the child lacks a form of white blood cell known as the granulocyte. The condition used to be 100% fatal. But the Government-sponsored Anti-Leukemia Task Force found that adult victims of a different kind of leukemia, the chronic myelogenous form, have a great excess of granulocytes. Some have donated blood from which up to 100 billion granulocytes have been extracted and given to a single child victim of the acute disease. And in 60% of such cases, the treatment has overcome the infection.

This method cannot yet be used for patients who are free of cancer. But Dr. Zubrod foresees a day when extraction of the granulocytes from normal blood can be made so much more efficient that they will become available for safe treatment of other illnesses.

Spin the Platelets. Progress along these lines has already been made in supplying platelets--the tiny elements in the blood which enable it to clot--from healthy donors to leukemia patients threatened with uncontrollable hemorrhage. A healthy donor gives two pints of blood at a sitting, instead of the usual single pint. But while he is still on the table, high-speed centrifuges separate the platelets. Most of the rest of the blood (red cells, white cells and plasma) is returned to his veins at once. He can continue such donations twice a week for months on end. Al ready available at the N.C.I, in Bethesda, Md., the equipment that separates the platelets for leukemia patients is now being installed in Boston, Philadelphia, Houston and Los Angeles.

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