3D Bone Marrow Model May Help Experts Better Treat Blood Disorders

Researchers believe they have discovered a mechanism to better predict therapy and results for people with blood platelet problems.

Findings claim that the tool could be handy for people with platelet diseases like hereditary thrombocytopenias -- a set of conditions that affect platelet production.

Experts uploaded the study, titled "Miniaturized 3D Bone Marrow Tissue Model to Assess Response to Thrombopoietin-Receptor Agonists in Patients," in the journal eLife.

Doctors Preserve Umbilical Cord Blood To Save Leukemic Girl — BEIJING, CHINA - MARCH 8: (CHINA OUT) A newborn baby boy lies on a bed beside a bag of umbilical cord blood collected from him at Beijing Chuiyangliu Hospital on March 8, 2005 in Beijing, China. Umbilical cord blood has been collected from him to be used to try and cure his leukemic sister. Leukemia patients are increasing by approximately 40,000 a year in China, over half of them are children and more than four million patients are waiting for bone marrow transplants. The country has set up a placenta blood bank in Beijing as a proactive measure to fight leukemia. China Photos/Getty Images

Patients with low platelet count diseases have therapeutic alternatives, such as Eltrombopag. However, the efficacy of those medications and treatments varies from patient to patient.

Researchers at the University of Pavia in Pavia, Italy, used a small 3D model of bone marrow to test the drug's effect on blood cells as part of their research.

The model intends to make therapy for people with blood diseases easier and provide a tool to assess the efficacy of medications in humans.

Eltrombopag Could Help Improve Platelet Production

Platelets are blood cells that help the blood clot and stop bleeding. Too few platelets can cause internal or significant bleeding following surgery or injury, usually treated with clotting treatments. A medicine called Eltrombopag has been demonstrated in recent tests to enhance platelet production.

ALSO READ : Researchers Predict Increase in Cancer Cases That Need Surgery

However, not all patients seemed to benefit from it. Medical Xpress said researchers used a silk protein scaffold and patient-derived cell culture to discover which patients respond well to the medicine.

The researchers then looked at what happened when they added Eltrombopag to a blood sample from a patient who had previously been treated with the medicine for a platelet issue. The researchers discovered that the number of platelets created in the model correlated to how each patient responded to the Eltrombopag drug. The number of platelets taken from the model increased similar to the number of platelets in patients' blood after treatment.

"This easy-to-reproduce system may also help scientists better understand what goes wrong in these disorders and how treatments work, as well as provide them with a new tool for testing new drugs that may lead to improved therapies in the future," senior author Alessandra Balduini, a professor at the University of Pavia, said per ScienceDaily.

3D Bone Marrow Model Could Help Identify Well To Treatments

Researchers said treatments based on the small 3D bone marrow model might correctly identify which patients would respond well to the medicine and manufacture enough platelets in the blood to prevent clotting.

"This device is a significant improvement over previous models, requiring only a very small sample of blood to recreate platelet production," Christian Di Buduo, an assistant professor of research at the Department of Molecular Medicine, University of Pavia, said in a News Medical report.

Researchers said the technology could one day be scaled up to manufacture vast quantities of lab-grown blood cells for transfusion, allowing clinicians to "tailor therapy options to each individual."

They also expect that the technology would enable individuals with similar diseases to receive better therapy with fewer side effects.