Health
Plasma You Sell in East Kansas City Could End up in Medicine an Ocean Away
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By Suzanne King
Michael Mullen donates blood plasma every Tuesday and Thursday. He has for 12 years.
Takeaways
- The U.S. is one of a handful of countries that lets people sell plasma.
- Plasma donation centers in the United States, including 11 in Kansas City, supply 70% of the world’s plasma.
- Drug therapies made from the plasma are life-saving to people with rare, chronic diseases.
- But critics worry that the effects of frequent, long-term donation are unknown.
The money it brings in — a little over $100 a week — augments what he makes as a chef. He’s come to rely on it.
“It helps supplement bill paying,” he said recently, smoking a cigarette outside the Biomat USA donation center on East 63rd Street where he’d just spent an hour and a half in the donation chair. “If I didn’t have it, I don’t know. I don’t know what would happen.”
Kelcey Gordon is out of work and said he’d struggle without the money he makes donating twice a week. Standing outside the same for-profit plasma donation center, one of 11 in the Kansas City area, he said he is grateful for the extra cash it represents.
In the $35 billion plasma pharmaceutical industry, Mullen, Gordon and some 3 million other U.S. adults supply the raw material the industry counts on.
The plasma they deposit every week is tested, processed and separated into protein parts that become medicine to treat rare, chronic conditions like immune deficiencies, autoimmune diseases and bleeding disorders.
Their plasma, collected at a storefront that shares a shopping center with a Thriftway and lies just a block east of Cash America Pawn, will end up in medicines sold for hundreds or thousands of dollars a dose. It will likely treat patients on the other side of the world.
Thanks to regulations that make the United States one of the few countries to let companies pay for plasma, and because people here can donate as often as twice a week, the U.S. supplies about 70% of the world’s plasma.
“This is the world basket of plasma,” said Peter Jaworski, a Georgetown University professor who studies the plasma economy.
The industry — with the enthusiastic backing of organizations that advocate for people suffering from the diseases that plasma therapies treat — says the system works. If people weren’t paid to donate, they argue demand could not be met. That would mean thousands of people would die or be unable to live normal lives.
The plasma centers, most of them owned and operated by pharmaceutical companies based overseas, say their business models also inject money into local communities.
Donation centers employ phlebotomists, security guards and screeners. And the payments made to donors — which vary based on how often someone donates and, in some cases, how much a donor weighs — go back into the local economy.
But doctors and public health experts caution that no one really knows what frequent plasma donations over many years could mean for donors’ health.
And they worry that poor people provide a bulk of U.S. donations at plasma centers. Plasma centers tend to set up in disadvantaged neighborhoods and rely on incentive programs designed to make donors give again and again.
Plasma centers push people to give as often as possible, but they don’t disclose the unknown risks of frequently extracting plasma from their blood for many years.
“People perceive it as a better alternative than high-cost loans that lead to debt,” said Emily A. Gallagher, an assistant professor of finance at the University of Colorado. She co-authored a study about the intersection between plasma donors and payday loan customers.
“Without knowing the longer-term health consequences,” she said, “it’s analogous to a loan against your future house with an unknown interest rate.”
Therapies from donated plasma
The blood running through your veins includes red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets and plasma. Plasma — a yellow-tinged liquid — accounts for more than half of your blood.
It is 90% water, but also contains proteins vital to living a normal life. When someone has plasma that lacks — or is short on — certain proteins, they end up with rare and chronic diseases. Medicines made from healthy human plasma treat those diseases by supplementing the lacking plasma.
For someone with primary immune deficiency, a condition in which a person’s immune system doesn’t function properly, it takes 130 donations to cover a year’s worth of treatment. For a person with alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, a potentially fatal disease that can lead to organ damage, that number jumps to 900 donations a year. And for someone with hemophilia, a blood clotting disorder, it takes 1,200 donations of plasma to make a year’s worth of medicine.
Scientists have known about blood circulation since 1628, and blood transfusions began almost that long ago. In 1665, a British doctor figured out how to keep a dog alive by transfusing blood from other dogs.
At the beginning of the 20th century, scientists began to figure out that different people had different blood types. And by World War II the value of blood plasma was well understood.
In 1940, researchers developed a process to break plasma down into individual components to treat patients. That’s essentially what happens to plasma donated today.
Wild west of plasma collection
Donated plasma goes through a process known as fractionation, which separates plasma into various protein parts. Once it is tested and cleaned — a process that can take up to a year — those proteins are pooled with other donors’ plasma and made into therapies.
Plasma therapies for patients on the receiving end are considered extremely safe today. Tests designed to find plasma tainted by disease are highly effective. And plasma pharmaceutical makers won’t use plasma until a donor has given at least twice and the donor has passed a health screening. In addition, plasma is treated to kill any lingering virus before it is used in medicine.
But in the 1980s, before it was understood that viruses like HIV could be transmitted through blood, plasma transfusions proved deadly.
In the United States, 63% of hemophiliacs contracted HIV after receiving plasma from infected donors. Others contracted hepatitis B and hepatitis C, diseases that are also transmitted through blood.
After those “wild west days of plasma collection,” Jaworski said, the industry underwent drastic changes. That included pharmaceutical companies taking over independent donation centers. In recent years, those centers have multiplied.
Pharmaceutical companies operate a combined 1,000 collection centers in the United States. That’s compared to 300 in 2005.
The business of taking human plasma and turning it into medicine is worth about $35 billion this year. And that could nearly double by 2032, according to Fortune Business Insights, a market research firm.
Growing demand for plasma donations
Kansas City-area donation centers are all owned directly by the companies that make the plasma-derived drugs.
They include the Biomat on 63rd Street, owned by Grifols S.A., a Spanish company. Other Kansas City donation centers are owned by CSL Ltd., based in Australia, Takeda Pharmaceuticals from Japan and Octapharma Plasma, out of Switzerland.
Experts say the influx of new donation centers in recent years follows growing demand for plasma therapies. That’s because scientists are figuring out that more diseases can benefit from plasma medicines. During the COVID pandemic, plasma transfusions from previously infected donors were tried as a treatment, but its effectiveness isn’t understood because scientific testing was lacking.
Demand for plasma therapies is also up because more people are being diagnosed with diseases that could benefit from them.
For example, improved newborn screenings mean more people know they have primary immune deficiency, diseases that affect an estimated 500,000 people. But according to the Immune Deficiency Foundation, “tens of thousands” of others remain undiagnosed.
Only the United States, Germany, the Czech Republic and a few other countries allow payments for plasma donations. The countries that restrict payments have to rely on imports, primarily from the U.S. There is no synthetic alternative to human plasma.
That’s why Jaworski wants more countries to allow paid plasma.
“There isn’t a single country in the world that collects enough plasma to meet demand unless they compensate donors,” he said. “The most important moral mission for a system of blood and plasma collection is to meet the needs of patients.”
By that standard, he said, the American system is unquestionably succeeding.
“America not only collects enough for its own citizens,” he said, “it also collects enough for the rest of the world.”
Is donating plasma twice a week safe?
Through a process known as plasmapheresis, the plasma collected at for-profit centers is taken out of a donor’s arm as whole blood, pumped into a machine that separates out plasma and returns red blood cells and other components of blood to the donor.
That process, known as source plasma collection, is regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and also overseen by the countries that import the plasma. Donors spend about 90 minutes in the donation chair.
Nonprofit blood centers like the Community Blood Center of Greater Kansas City collect plasma through whole blood donations. Plasma is separated out once blood has been donated. But that process yields much less plasma.
Nonprofit blood banks don’t pay for donations. For one thing, hospitals won’t accept blood from a donor who has been compensated. And the World Health Organization advises against paying for donations. It’s considered risky because donors who give blood because they need money could be more likely to misrepresent their health history — essentially hiding the likelihood that they’re carrying blood-borne infections.
Because plasma used in pharmaceuticals is so thoroughly processed, the risk posed by paid donations is lower. Jaworski said it’s proved to be extraordinarily safe for 30 years. He argues that objections to paid plasma donations are unrealistic when so many people rely on plasma therapies.
He compared paying people for their plasma to hiring firefighters rather than relying on volunteers. The payment doesn’t diminish the good act, he said.
“At some point, you get too many fires and you have to pay people to put out the fires,” he said. “We hit that tipping point (for plasma) more than 20 years ago.”
People who rely on the therapies created from paid-for plasma are actively campaigning to be sure paid donations continue.
The Immune Deficiency Foundation has a program meant to recruit more paid donors. “Your work will encourage donors to continue donating and, in turn, encourage their friends and family to donate plasma as well,” the organization’s web page says.
But while plasma-derived therapies are critical for the patients relying on them to live a normal life, some doctors worry about what plasma donation could do to donors.
Plasma collection centers advise donors to drink lots of water, get sleep and have a healthy meal before donating. In the near term, donors are told to be prepared for certain temporary side effects like dehydration, dizziness and fatigue.
On its webpage, CSL Plasma also warns about the possibility that donating frequently for a long period of time can deplete immunoglobulin levels, which can lower a person’s ability to fight off infections.
What is the downside to donating plasma?
Dr. Morey A. Blinder, a hematologist at Washington University, said that’s definitely something frequent plasma donors should worry about. Long-term studies, looking at people who donate plasma twice a week, year after year, simply haven’t been done, he said.
“You’re depleting a person’s proteins in their bloodstream,” he said. “And it’s hard to know what the effect of that is.”
Proteins regenerate, he said, so in the short term, people can keep up. But it’s unclear what happens over time.
And while the plasma collection centers monitor donors’ health, their incentive isn’t to limit donations. It’s to collect as much plasma as possible.
“There are financial incentives to these donors to stay on schedule and keep donating,” Blinder said.
Many doctors would feel more comfortable, he said, if that pressure were reduced. Blinder also would like to see more frequent checks of donors’ blood levels, and a weekly, rather than twice weekly, donation limit.
“People in this field would say that would be an advantage,” he said.
Blinder also questions whether the pharmaceutical companies are paying donors fairly. Donors take home around $50 per donation, but the medicine it’s eventually turned into can cost $200 a gram, perhaps $16,000 per treatment dose, depending on the illness.
“We don’t have a good sense of the margins they earn on the plasma,” said Gallagher, the University of Colorado professor.
Right or wrong, the paid plasma business has become a reasonably big thread in the country’s social safety net. Gallagher found that people tend to donate plasma so they can get extra money and avoid taking out high-interest loans to make ends meet. Donors range from college students to single parents to low-wage earners who just need extra cash.
BioLife Plasma Services is promising new donors “up to $800.” And CSL Plasma advertises new donors “over $700 your first month.”
Whether or not donors are getting a fair payment, selling plasma is tempting a growing number of Americans. And, like Mullen and Gordon, they’re relying on the extra cash.
That’s why most mornings, before CSL Plasma’s donation center at 37th and Broadway opens for business at 6 a.m., a line of ready donors is already waiting outside.
This article first appeared on Beacon: Kansas City and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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This story was originally published by The Kansas City Beacon, an online news outlet focused on local, in-depth journalism in the public interest.
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Health
Can Stuff in Rosemary Extract Fight Cocaine Addiction?
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Researchers have discovered that an antioxidant found in rosemary extract can reduce intakes of cocaine by moderating the brain’s reward response, offering a new therapeutic target for treating addiction.
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The study in the journal Neuron describes researchers’ focus on a region of the brain called the globus pallidus externus, which acts as a gatekeeper that regulates how we react to cocaine.
They discovered that within the GPe, parvalbumin-positive neurons are crucial in controlling the response to cocaine by changing the activity neurons releasing the pleasure molecule dopamine.
“There are currently no effective therapeutics for dependence on psychostimulants such as cocaine, which, along with opioids, represent a substantial health burden,” says corresponding author Kevin Beier, an associate professor of physiology and biophysics at the University of California, Irvine.
“Our study deepens our understanding of the basic brain mechanisms that increase vulnerability to substance use disorder-related outcomes and provides a foundation for the development of new interventions.”
Findings in mice revealed that globus pallidus externus parvalbumin-positive cells, which indirectly influence the release of dopamine, become more excitable after being exposed to cocaine. This caused a drop in the expression of certain proteins that encode membrane channels that usually help keep the globus pallidus cell activity in check. The researchers found that carnosic acid, an isolate of rosemary extract, selectively binds to the affected channels, providing an avenue to reduce response to the drug in a relatively specific fashion.
“Only a subset of individuals are vulnerable to developing a substance use disorder, but we cannot yet identify who they are. If globus pallidus cell activity can effectively predict response to cocaine, it could be used to measure likely responses and thus serve as a biomarker for the most vulnerable,” Beier says. “Furthermore, it’s possible that carnosic acid could be given to those at high risk to reduce the response to cocaine.”
The next steps in this research include thoroughly assessing negative side effects of carnosic acid and determining the ideal dosage and timing. The team is also interested in testing its efficacy in reducing the desire for other drugs and in developing more potent and targeted variants.
Scientists from the University of West Virginia and the University of Colorado participated in the study.
Support for this work came from the National Institutes of Health, One Mind, the Alzheimer’s Association, New Vision Research, BrightFocus Foundation, and the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation.
Source: UC Irvine
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Previously Published on futurity.org with Creative Commons License
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Health
Hoka's 'Amazing' Walking Shoes That 'Have So Much More Cushion' Than Other Sneakers Are A Super-Rare 20% Off
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This summer was filled with discounts on almost every Hoka hiking shoe, from the light and breezy Speedgoat trail runner to the ultra-durable Kaha hiking boot. The brand’s iconic running shoes very rarely go on sale, but a select few have received surprise discounts at Dick’s Sporting Goods, including the Clifton, the Solimar, and now the ever-popular Bondi.
The Hoka Bondi 8 Running Shoe is on sale for $132 at Dick’s Sporting Goods right now—a rare 20% off the normal price of $165. These sneakers have maintained a 4.3-star rating after more than 4,300 votes, and they’re a top 3 bestselling style at Dick’s along with the Hoka Clifton and Brooks’ Adrenaline. The Bondi is only on sale in a single color—a nice neutral gray-green tone—but it’s available in all sizes from 8 to 14, though that may not be the case for much longer.
Hoka Bondi 8 Running Shoes in Slate, $132 (was $165) at Dick’s Sporting Goods
The Bondi 8 is one of Hoka’s bestselling models—if not the top dog—because it offers a massive stack of cushion that makes people feel like they’re walking on air. Its light and bouncy foam midsole is ideal for pounding neighborhood pavement on short runs, but it’s also great as a walking shoe and a shoe for standing all day. Up top, a breathable mesh upper helps keep feet cool while underneath, strategically placed rubber inlays help fight abrasion, extending the life of the shoe months beyond the average pair. They’re also certified by the American Podiatric Medical Association as a style that promotes good foot health.
Shoppers wear the Bondi everywhere from the track to the coffee shop, but it’s becoming increasingly popular among medical workers who need all-day support. “I am a resident physician and am on my feet for 80 hours a week,” a shopper began. “The Bondi 8 is the most comfortable shoe I’ve ever worn in the hospital…I used to just buy cheap shoes and would wear them until they fell apart, but these shoes are amazing. They have so much more cushion than other shoes that are popular among healthcare workers. My feet aren’t sore at all at the end of my shift.”
Hoka running shoes rarely go on sale, which is why it’s shocking to see the Bondi 8 for just $132 at Dick’s. If you’ve been shopping for a new pair and you’re into this neutral tone, grab yourself a pair soon, because when it comes to Hoka sales, sizes don’t hang around for long.
Health
From STEM to STEAM, a Conversation with Brooke Brown
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In our latest episode of The Schoolyard Podcast, host Nancy Chung welcomes Brooke Brown, a National Board Certified Teacher, National Presenter, and Curriculum Author specializing in STEM, Makerspaces, Coding, and Robotics.
Nancy and Brooke explore the world of STEM education and the importance of including the arts in STEAM education to prepare students for future challenges.
Brooke’s background in education has driven her passion for creating innovative products that foster engaging learning experiences. She emphasizes the significance of STEAM in bridging the gap between classroom learning and real-world innovation and equipping students with essential skills for an evolving job market.
They discuss STEM education, and Brooke shares personal stories of integrating the arts into STEM projects, which has led to unexpected breakthroughs and memorable learning moments for her students.
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Brooke also talks about her favorite STEAM lessons, including chain reactions, pumpkin catapults, and paper roller coasters, highlighting the excitement and engagement these activities bring to students.
The episode concludes with a fun segment where Brooke imagines a STEAM superhero team, showcasing the unique powers each member would bring to solve global challenges. Listen in to hear who makes it on Brooke’s squad!
To learn more about Brooke Brown and her resources for STEM and STEAM education, visit her website and connect with her on social media.
Stay tuned for more insightful discussions on education in upcoming episodes of The Schoolyard Podcast. Class dismissed!
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Brooke Brown
Brooke is in her 18th year of teaching literacy and STEM in Oklahoma. After 10 years teaching grades 1-3, she now serves as a Gifted Resource Coordinator for early childhood students, focusing on Gifted and Talented, STEM, Math Enrichment, and Advanced Literacy for grades K-2. Her classroom also functions as a Makerspace for grades K-2 on Mondays and Fridays.
Brooke is passionate about creating hands-on, innovative resources to foster engaging, play-based learning experiences. She is a National Board Certified Teacher as an Early Childhood Generalist and was honored as Roosevelt Elementary Teacher of the Year and Norman Public Schools District Teacher of the Year for 2013-2014. She holds a Bachelor’s in Elementary Education and a Master’s in Educational Leadership from the University of Central Oklahoma.
Brooke has authored resources for Teachers Pay Teachers and created STEM Bins® and Reading Construction Toolkits. Balancing teaching with family life, she spends quality time with her husband of 15 years, Andy, and their two children, Ellie and Beau.
Learn more about Brooke at Teach Outside the Box.
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