Development and evaluation of neutrophil transfusion to treat antibiotic resistant infections in neutropenic patients

Neutropenia is a life threatening complication to modern cancer chemotherapy. Broad spectrum antibiotics are routinely given to these neutropenic patients. However, the rise of resistance threatens to crack the antibiotic shield that chemotherapy relies on.

Already today, prophylactic antibiotics/antimycotics fail 32% of patients undergoing myeloablative therapies and a quarter of these patients die within 100 days. Platelets are routinely transfused to thrombocytopenic patients and erythrocytes to anemic patients. We believe transfusing neutrophils to neutropenic patients on a broad scale could be a game changer.

At present in Karolinska, we provide neutrophil transfusion to a few critically ill patients every year.

It works well and the main limiting factor is supply as neutrophils are harvested from living donors in a slow, cumbersome and very expensive process.

With this project, we aim to solve the supply issues that are holding back neutrophil transfusion by developing a protocol that enables the isolation of large amounts of neutrophils from buffy coats, byproducts of blood donation.

This will enable neutropenic patients to get neutrophil transfusions quickly, at low cost and without involving volunteer neutrophil donors.

Our preliminary results are encouraging and we plan to scale up the isolation protocol and test the neutrophils in a mouse sepsis model to verify the safety/efficacy of buffy coat-derived neutrophils before moving on to conduct a small clinical study.