Doctors in the United States have completed what is reported to be the world's first bone marrow transplant to treat a non-malignant disease using bone marrow recovered from a deceased organ donor, Franciscan Health and Ossium Health announced on Tuesday 10 November, according to GlobeNewswire. The patient, a 40-year-old woman with a decade-long history of aplastic anaemia, received the transplant at Franciscan Health in Indianapolis, using bone marrow supplied by Ossium. Readers should note that "world's first reported" is the companies' claim — their treating physician said it is the first such transplant "to our knowledge".
The woman was first diagnosed with aplastic anaemia in 2015, and her disease progressed from stable to severe aplastic anaemia despite multiple lines of therapy, according to the announcement. Aplastic anaemia is a rare and serious condition in which the bone marrow stops making enough new blood cells. On 18 April 2026, after a reduced-intensity conditioning regimen, she received a transplant with a cell dose of 6.84 million CD34+ cells per kilogram from a deceased organ donor, according to GlobeNewswire.
Six months after the transplant, the recipient has achieved durable engraftment and haematologic recovery, meaning the donor marrow has taken hold and restored her blood counts, according to the announcement. She has become independent of blood and platelet transfusions and has experienced no graft-versus-host disease, according to Ossium. Bone marrow transplantation for severe aplastic anaemia has been performed since the 1970s using living related and unrelated donors, according to the treating physician, Dr Felix Mensah, but finding a suitable living donor can take months — time some patients do not have.
For non-malignant conditions including severe aplastic anaemia, sickle cell disease, beta thalassemia and other inherited or acquired bone marrow failure disorders, bone marrow-derived stem cells are widely regarded as the preferred stem cell source over peripheral blood stem cells, according to the announcement, because bone marrow carries a lower risk of chronic graft-versus-host disease. Ossium's work in banking bone marrow recovered from organ donors was also described by Forbes on 3 November, which noted the company's marrow had been used to treat blood cancer and, in one case, severe aplastic anaemia.
The transplant builds on a milestone Ossium first reached in June 2024, when the first blood cancer patient was treated with the company's organ donor bone marrow, according to GlobeNewswire. Ossium now plans to support the transplantation of additional patients with both malignant and non-malignant diseases through its HOPE Program. This is a single patient at six months' follow-up, so wider use will depend on further cases — but if the approach proves repeatable, it could give patients who lack a living donor a new source of the marrow they need.