So, obviously things go wrong when someone has a malignancy. A tumor, let's say. Your body has failed to find that malignant cell and destroy it. Or, there are a number of diseases known as autoimmune diseases. Which means that your body all of a sudden for reasons nobody understands starts destroying parts of itself. So, say rheumatoid arthritis all of a sudden your body reacts to it's joints and causes inflammation. And, actually starts destructive processes. So, what our laboratory is looking to do is to modulate the immune response. Either, to enhance it in the case of a tumor. How can we enhance this and make your own immune response destroy the tumor? Which it shouldn't have done in the first place.
Or the case of rheumatoid arthritis, how can we damper it a bit so that it can take care of the foreign matter, the bacteria and the viruses, and yet not destroy the joints. And that is what our laboratory is trying to do is to modulate the immune response to clinical advantage. What does this have to do with blood banking? It turns out that these white cells that we were studying are actually detrimental for transfusion products.
What happens when you donate a unit of blood, you donate a lot of white cells along with the red cells. And, if I were to donate a unit of blood and it was give to you as a patient my white cells are going to recognize your entire body as foreign. And, that is not a very good situation if you're ill you need a transfusion. Having this massive immune response is not a particularly healthy situation.
The blood banking industry has had to figure out ways to eliminate the white cells from blood products. And in most institutions, most blood banking institutions, the white cells are removed and tossed away. But obviously, in this situation at Stanford Blood Center we have laboratories that are looking at white blood cells. They're studying them. This is gold to us, to have this reagent downstairs that we can use for our studies. These specimens are de-identified. There's no names that come up. All that comes up, are healthy white blood cell concentrates. We can use them for our studies. We can look at the interactions of different types of white blood cells. How they communicate, how they interact in order to keep you healthy Obviously, you're a healthy volunteer. Or, we can put them in your ases systems and prepare the healthy blood with the blood of patients if we doing ases to see what's going on. Why are these cells not functioning they way they should? And, how can we intervene in order to keep everybody healthy?
So, when you donate blood at the Stanford Blood Center there are two key points. One, is that you are helping not only keep people that are in a hospital today and in a hospital tomorrow. But, you are helping patients of the future by donating blood that might be used for research in white blood cells.
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