Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Although existing clinical evidence shows that the transfusion of blood components is becoming increasingly safe, the risk of transmission of known and unknown pathogens, new pathogens or re-emerging pathogens still persists. Pathogen reduction technologies may offer a new approach to increase blood safety. A large, multidisciplinary team was created and divided into six groups, each of which addressed one or more HTA domains.
The available evidence is not sufficient to state which of the techniques compared is superior in terms of efficacy, safety and cost-effectiveness. Further research is needed to provide a comprehensive overview of the cost-effectiveness profile of the different pathogen-reduction techniques. The wide heterogeneity of results and the lack of comparative evidence are reasons why more comparative studies need to be performed.
Keywords: health technology assessment, pathogen reduction, pathogen inactivation, fresh-frozen plasma, transfusion safety. Plasma is a complex mixture of water, inorganic salts, nutrients such as carbohydrates, lipids and amino acids , organic waste products, peptides, enzymes, hormones, and more than 1, proteins 1 , 2.
Since the separation of plasma from whole blood became standard practice, the amount of frozen plasma used started to increase steadily 4 , 5. Currently, human plasma may be used as a therapeutic product, known as clinical plasma or fresh-frozen plasma FFP , or as source material for the production of pharmaceutical fractionated products also called plasma products or plasma-derived medicinal products 6 , 7. Plasma units for transfusion may be obtained by separation of the plasma from collected whole blood or by apheresis procedures 2.
Plasma units contain many biologically active molecules 8. Several plasma products are available for transfusion or for industrial fractionation: four frozen plasma products and two liquid-state plasma products. The frozen plasma products are: i FFP, ii frozen plasma FP , frozen within 24 hours of phlebotomy, iii cryoprecipitate-reduced plasma and iv cryoprecipitate.
