Bone banking in the UK blood services

Abstract

The UK has a long and respected history in the field of bone donation, processing and storage, dating from the late 1950's. The Yorkshire Regional Tissue Bank was a pioneering project which made important contributions to the development of the field, working with colleagues at Leeds University to develop safe, effective and practical methods of tissue preservation and sterilisation. During the late 1980's, blood centres in Scotland, and then England, began to provide bone banking services in response to concerns relating to disease transmission risk. This development occurred at many centres around the country and mostly involved the retrieval, storage and supply of frozen femoral heads without further processing, though in two centres, cadaveric bone donation and bone processing were also implemented. These blood centre tissue banks adapted and applied the policies and procedures for donor selection and testing and the principles of quality assurance that were already well developed for blood banking. The late 1990's and early 2000's saw considerable consolidation and the merging of Yorkshire Regional Tissue Bank and the North Wales Tissue Bank with the English NBS Tissue Services. Both the Scottish and the English blood services now operate nationally managed tissue banking services with standardised protocols and documentation. Living donor and cadaveric donor programmes are organised from a large number of centres but bone is processed in a much smaller number of centres which achieve the required GMP standards. While there continues to be a significant demand for unprocessed femoral heads, a wide range of processed bone products is also supplied, with freezing and freeze-drying as the main methods of preservation applied. Agreed strategies for future service development focus on further consolidation with the development of high quality facilities including research and development and in-house tissue retrieval.