Every year, around 20,000 leukemia patients need a bone marrow transplant—but nearly half of them are unable to find one that’s suitable and die as a result, according to the Health Resources and Services Administration. This disproportionately impacts patients of color and low-income patients.
Ossium Health is working to streamline this process through its bone marrow bank, which launched last year. This bank has thousands of transplantable units of bone marrow available on-demand, drastically reducing the waiting time from months to days. Its goal is to increase the percentage of patients receiving transplants to 95% in the next 10 years, and its bone marrow bank is the winner of Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas Award for companies with between 50 and 199 employees.
In order to achieve its target, the company is working with organ-procurement organizations, nonprofits that recover organs from deceased donors for transplant in the United States. This allows it to source bone marrow from existing organ donors. It established a proprietary process for extracting and packaging bone marrow, and it also set up a facility where transplantable units of bone marrow could be cryopreserved at super low temperatures for decades, ready to ship to transplant physicians on demand.
Ossium Health has been collecting bone marrow since shortly after it launched in 2016. (It was founded as a bioengineering company that uses stem cell science to develop treatments for hematologic diseases, organ rejection, and musculoskeletal defects.) In 2023, it opened its bone marrow bank to transplant physicians for the first time. Ossium Health also started clinical trials to treat patients with acute myeloid leukemia and acute lymphoblastic leukemia, and it launched an expanded access program called the HOPE program for those who aren’t eligible for a clinical trial.
CEO Kevin Caldwell, who cofounded Ossium Health with Chief Science Officer Erik Woods, told Fast Company that part of the reason he was inspired to start Ossium Health was because while he was growing up in Tennessee, he watched his grandparents go in and out of the healthcare system. They were retroactively diagnosed and prescribed treatments that would reduce their suffering but not necessarily improve their overall health.
“There’s an urgent need to transform the way we deploy that care,” Caldwell says. “These kinds of therapies are the kind of interventions that we need if we’re going to move to a more health-preservation model rather than a disease-treatment model.”
Explore the full list of Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas, 281 projects that are making the world more accessible, equitable, and sustainable for everyone. We’ve selected the companies, organizations, and nonprofits making the biggest impact across 50 categories, including architecture, energy, finance, transportation, and more.