Blood plasma fractionation centre in Chennai soon

The south Indian state of Tamil Nadu will soon have a plasma fractionation centre in Chennai to make blood plasma components available for patients at affordable prices.

Currently, the plasma derived products such as factor VIII and factor IX derivatives are mainly imported from foreign countries. These imported factor VIII and factor IX derivatives are usually very expensive and out of the reach of common people.

The Indian government has laready allocated Rs 250 crore to start a plasma fractionation facility in Chennai.

Once operational the centre will have capacity to process more than 1.5 lakh litres of plasma derived from human blood.The Chennai plasma fractionation facility will manufacture all important plasma derivatives which are being imported.

The National AIDS Control Organization (NACO) will set up plasma fractionation centre in Chennai as part of the ongoing National AIDS Control Programme- phase-III to ensure access of plasma derivatives to needy patients at affordable prices, reports said.

Like whole blood transfusion, plasma and plasma components are administered in several medical conditions such as haemophilia-A, haemophilia -B, Von-Willebrand’s disease, immunodeficiencies etc.

Patients suffering from diseases including haemophilia-A Von-Willebrand’s disease may require periodic transfusion of certain plasma components like anti-hemophilic factor (AHF) lifelong.

Haemophila patients don’t generally require transfusion of whole blood. However, whole blood is often administered to these patients because of the lack of access of the desired plasma products.

Whole blood contains several such components including plasma and it will be a wastage of the precious resource of human blood if used in whole for conditions they requires only certain componets of the blood.

The plasma fractionation centre will use Cohn n Chromatography Technology as a process.   The state-of-the-art facility with the latest technology and equipment will be implemented as “centrally sponsored scheme”.

The public-funded plasma fractionation centre will be operated on a self-sustained, non-profit model.

Human plasma is the source of over 700 proteins of considerable therapeutic value such as albumin, clotting factors, immunoglobulins, fibrinogen and others.

The process used to extract and purify these proteins is known as plasma fractionation.
Classical fractionation employs selective precipitation of proteins by manipulation of solution pH, ionic strength, temperature and ethanol content.

Modern fractionation increasingly employs chromatography to make higher purity and better activity products.

Contamination of plasma compounds can cause product instability as well as plugging downstream filters and should be removed via prefiltration.

Clarification is used to remove contaminants prior to chromatography or UF steps, while sterilizing-grade filtration is a final step used to reduce bioburden and to sterilize heat labile proteins.

A critical step, viral clearance, ensures the removal of viruses known to have contaminated source plasma such as parvovirus, hepatitis and HIV.

Specialty antibodies such as hyper-immune globulin typically include a viral clearance filtration step in their manufacturing process.