Spain needs plasma, basic material for numerous medicines and for at least 30,000 patients. And it needs many liters to be self-sufficient. Specifically, about 600,000 liters (it has more than 400,000) that are currently being bought in the United States at a “huge” price. In fact, it is one of the most expensive components in the hospital pharmacy. To do this, they are working on a national plan to be able to obtain those proteins that are so valuable and so difficult to synthesize.
This was explained by Cristina Arbona, director of the Cat Foundation and head of the Transfusion Center of the Valencian Community, at the VII HematoAvanza dissemination conference, organized by the Spanish Society of Hematology and Hemotherapy (SEHH) and held in San Lorenzo de El Escorial (Madrid).
The lack of plasma is not a Spanish problem. In Europe there is a serious lack of this blood component to obtain these drugs (around 60%), so it depends on third countries. So the EU has urged countries to put in the means to be self-sufficient. Spain has had a National Strategy for Self-sufficiency in Plasma since last year.
“This foreign dependence also generates a situation of risk of insufficiency whose consequences we already suffered in 2021 due to various factors, among which it is worth noting the low collection in 2020 caused by the covid and the progressive increase in the consumption of immunoglobulins ”, explains Arbona.
From the exclusive donation of plasma (plasmapheresis) certain proteins are obtained that are vital for many patients and for which there is no other alternative, such as immunoglobulins, coagulation factors and albumin.
Albumin treatments are used for patients who have suffered major burns, hemorrhagic shock, or who have undergone liver transplantation; while immunoglobulins (those that are most scarce) are used to treat a wide variety of diseases: autoimmune, neurological, hematological, infectious… And treatment with coagulation factors, for patients with coagulation problems, such as people with hemophilia.
These are some of the data that were put on the table in the aforementioned conferences, in which it was also revealed that the diagnoses of hematological cancers are increasing and for this 2023 it is estimated that there will be 27,000 new cases, eleven times more than ago one of each. The good news is that the new immunotherapies invite us to think that “soon” it will be possible to attend the cure of many of them.
Early detection and the aging of the population explain the gradual increase in its prevalence, of around 1% per year.
Thus, between 2002 and 2013, the HematoRedecan registry recorded 56,777 hematological cancers, of which the majority (39,156) were lymphoid – which account for 70% of the total and group together chronic lymphatic leukemia, acute lymphoblastic leukemia, lymphoma and multiple myeloma. The median age at diagnosis was 67 years. Globally, five-year survival was around 63%, although it differs according to the subtypes, indicates Rafael Marcos-Gragera, an epidemiologist at the Catalan Institute of Oncology and coordinator of this registry.
