Is it appropriate for patients who receive Bendamustine treatment for mantle cell lymphoma to receive irradiated blood products?

Anyone have any guidance or references?

Can you find any info in the drug package insert? Is it a purine analog like cladribine and fludarabine?

We are a community hospital with a bone marrow/stem cell/cord blood  transplant center. Our blood bank medical director is Dr. Joseph Sweeney (you can look up his illustrious credentials). He has recommended that  patients receiving fludarabine, bendamustine, claradibine, deoxycoformycin, alemtuzumab, anti-CD52, and campath within 2 years should receive irradiated blood products, but made our policy that they receive irradiated products for life. We usually only deal with fludaribine, but lately bendamustine is being seen a lot.

While the transplant team includes blood bank in their weekly meetings, sometimes communicating the meds can be missed. We now have a program in our HIS that when the pharmacy is dispensing these drugs, a printout comes to blood bank so we know and we put an irradiated product marker in our LIS.

Edited March 5, 201510 yr by PammyDQ

That's great. How do you catch all of the patients given these drugs as outpatients?  Or does your pharmacy dispense to the cancer outpatients as well?

On ‎3‎/‎9‎/‎2015 at 10:18 PM, Mabel Adams said:

That's great. How do you catch all of the patients given these drugs as outpatients?  Or does your pharmacy dispense to the cancer outpatients as well?

Hi Mabel, sorry for the extreme delay. I believe our patient population only receives these drugs in our Cancer Center's infusion center in another building on campus, and those are dispensed by our pharmacy. Of course there's always a risk with an "outside" patient, but in reality it's always the prescriber's responsibility to order the correct blood products for their patients. What we do goes over and above because we are very involved with our patients' care and do our best to support the docs in their treatment of the patients.