Can someone please explain or give references to how platelet expiration can be changed to 7 days? Is is additonal bacterial testing or a different bag used, etc?

South Florida Blood Bank (Florida Blood Service) out of Orlando Switched to 7 Day platelets I would say the week after the recomendaiton was made. I think that was close to over a year ago or More.

Regarding the 7 days if I do recollect, after bacterial testing is done the Plt is good 6 days or so. In actuality it is only giving you one more day (from a transfusionist perspective) in light of the (pre Bacterial Testing Days)

I am not sure of the Testing they did for feasability type studies on 7 day old Plts as opposed to 5 days. Is there a new preservative in use?

I believe FDA approved 7 day plateletpheresis with certain blood bag(by baxter) and if the unit is collected using certain machine( Trima). I need to look up the information.

Guess what I found the link:)

http://www.baxter.com/about_baxter/news_room/news_releases/2006/05-17-06-platelet_study.html

In order to move from 5 to 7 day platelets your blood supplier must be a participant in the PASSPORR study. 7 day platelets are only FDA approved if you are participating in this study. What this study entails is... Platelets must be cultured 24-26 hours post collection using an aerobic and anaerobic bottle on the BacTalert. The platelets must be held an additional 24 hours when the first reading of the bottles occur. If both bottles are neg the platelets can be labeled with 7 days and released to inventory. The bottles are incubated for the remainder of the 7 days. Our institution is participating in this study. We have seen a dramatic decrease in our outdating. You may think that you are not going to gain many days by having a 7 day outdate with this study but in essence you do gain at extra day.

We get our platelets from United Blood Services and they have the 7 day expiration. We definitely have a decrease in our outdating!

ABQ bloodbanker

I remember the lifespan of platelet is nine more days. I am very interested in what is about the function of seven-day shelf life apheresis platelet. Thanks for some helping.

It is Florida's Blood Centers in Orlando that switched to 7-day platelets. We worked closely with vendor's (Gambro BCT/ Baxter) for implementation and many months of preparation/planning to meet PASSPORT requirements.

Yanxia,

I agree that it is amazing that we can have a product that has a shelf-life of 7/10 of the lifespan of the product constituent in the body. (I was taught that platelets survive 10 days.) Does storage actually prolong the life of the average platelet? Does anyone know? The old bell-shaped curve would say that a certain portion of the platelets collected are already near the end of their life-span and more would get there as the product aged.

Years ago the FDA approved platelets for a 7 day outdate but quickly changed it back to 5 days because there were a lot more bacterial infections among recipients. With the advent of bacterial testing of pheresis plts, that concern is smaller so they could allow the longer outdate.

Laura,

We are a pretty small hospital blood center and are interested in becoming part of the PassPort study. We already collect in Trima...but have to get the BacTAlert in place (currently using the Palls system).....How much time (and effort) did it take you to become part of the study?

Thank you , Mabel.

Deb,

We switched from Pall's eBDS to the BacT/ALERT just over 2 years ago. Our "setup" (including: validation and SOP writing) of the BacT/ALERT system took about 3 months. We were up on 7-day platelets in less than a year -- the folks at Gambro were very helpful in getting us started so that we can collect data. They also have some strict criteria for product sampling, so I would make sure that you are in touch with them (becky.lippincott@gambrobct.com) before you start writing your pocedures. Their goal is to have a standardized set of data with very little variability so that they can prove their hypotheses.

It is a two-tier study. In Tier 1, you are just summarizing your release test (how many positives and how many total bottles you tested) and reporting the results quarterly. In Tier 2, you are re-testing any expired products. There is a significant space requirement there, so make sure that you purchase enough incubation space to accommodate the Tier 2 samples. And it's not just the "expired in-house" products that are retested, we also retest the too high/too low concentration or yield and aby screen positive (but not any other positive test).