Blood Centers’ Expanding Role in Advancing Cell and Gene Therapy

Founded in the 1960s, America’s Blood Centers (ABC) brings together independent, community-based blood centers from across North America. Its members operate hundreds of cell collection sites, supplying a significant portion of the US blood supply and supporting millions of patients through thousands of hospitals and healthcare facilities.

Building on this work, in May 2025, ABC joined the Blood and Cells Advocacy Roster (BCAR), a collaborative network of blood, tissue, and biotherapy organizations. Through the BCAR, ABC helps to highlight the contributions of community blood centers to advanced therapies and patient access to life-saving treatments.

“Blood products are not just lifesaving in their own right; they are the foundation on which many of today’s most groundbreaking advanced therapies are built,” said Kate Fry, CEO of ABC, in a related press release. “Community blood centers are helping lead the way in this new era of innovation by providing the raw materials necessary to find the next big medical breakthrough.”

ABC is increasingly supporting the development of cell and gene therapies (CGTs). With established systems for donor recruitment, apheresis, testing, processing, storage, and distribution, they are well-positioned to meet the growing needs of these therapies.

During the 2025 Association for the Advancement of Blood & Biotherapies (AABB) Annual Meeting, the BCAR hosted a panel discussion on this topic. Rather than focusing on future promise in abstract terms, four panelists shared their “on-the-ground” experience relating to autologous and allogeneic collections, donor recruitment, logistics, manufacturing, and patient access. The discussion was moderated by Fry. Here, we highlight some of the key talking points and themes from the session.

Customization before scale

Despite growing interest in standardization, the CGT space remains primarily customized. Each therapy, developer, hospital system, and patient population brings unique requirements that shape how blood centers operate in both autologous and allogeneic settings.

Scott Grady, who served as associate director of product portfolio strategy at Versiti at the time of the discussion and is now senior director of product management at Vitalant, noted that: “Everything is always custom. You start with one donor criteria and move on to the next.”

Supporting novel therapy developers often means building donor pools, workflows, and testing strategies tailored to individual programs. “All of these efforts are highly customized to each developer,” Grady added.

This variability extends into hospital partnerships too. Becky Cap, senior vice president of biotherapies at Vitalant, explained: “We have about five ways we’re doing it right now because we’re customizing it to the needs of the specific hospital. Eventually, that has to get streamlined, but for right now, it means accepting that kind of, forgive me, ‘chaos’ and managing through it to help support getting these therapies out.” 

Infrastructure already in place

While customization is key, panelists highlighted that much of the infrastructure required for advanced therapies—including collection, processing, logistics, and distribution—already exists.

“If you look at the infrastructure needed to deliver these therapies, we had 70–80% of that infrastructure for each of those functions,” Cap said. “So, the incremental add is pretty minimal compared to a fresh build in every community where these therapies are needed.”

This perspective has shaped how blood centers approach growth. “How do we use what we already have to make it work?” Cap asked, emphasizing that adapting existing processes to provide a framework is the way forward. With a general framework, we can move to managing client-specific differences, rather than there being a need to reinvent the wheel entirely.

Autologous therapies: one shot on goal

In autologous therapy, panelists emphasized how high the stakes are at the point of cell collection. With patients’ health often giving them only one opportunity for a successful collection, early decisions can have downstream implications for manufacturing, timelines, and patient outcomes.

Trevor Smith, cell and gene therapy market expansion lead at Terumo BCT, elaborated: “Often they get one shot on goal. How do you ensure that shot is the one for them to have a therapy at the other side of all of this stuff?”

For a collection to succeed, it must not only meet technical requirements but also be accessible and workable for patients. Panelists highlighted the importance of hospital partnerships and leveraging an existing geographic footprint in successfully supporting autologous therapies.

“I’d say, for us, it’s been hospital partnerships. Our nurses were there doing therapeutic apheresis for very sick patients. It wasn’t a big step to have them do patient collections for the hospitals, and that extended their capacity,” said Cap.

She continued: “As we think about talent and how to create access pathways for these patients, it’s been about leveraging footprint that might not have been used for cell therapy before. We have these nurses in different cities, but we have facilities all over. Could we do collections in their community and send them out for processing? Could we leverage collaborations to extend that even further?”

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“Part of making it work is looking for the partnerships that make sense for where we are today,” concluded Cap.

The panel highlighted the need for a variety of different collection locations to accommodate different patient access needs. Heather Munoz, principal, global market development at BBG Advanced Therapies, elaborated: “There are three models right now for autologous collections: inpatient hospital collections, outpatient blood center procedures, and mobile collections at rural oncology clinics.

"Not just one works—we all need to work with hospitals, community centers, and blood centers to be able to attract patients and make therapy possible.”

Geography, travel burden, and logistical complexity often determine whether therapy is feasible. “Patients can't afford to leave their family, go into a hospital for a day, travel four to five hours away. The logistics aren’t possible for a lot of people,” said Munoz.

Smith reinforced this point: “I like all those settings that have been mentioned, because regardless of whether it’s at a hospital, a blood center, or on a bus, we want to make sure that every collection is the best collection it can be—patients often get one shot on goal.”

“Every geography and every center is going to have to work specifically within the hospital and patient need in your service areas, and come up with the creative solutions that are going to drive this next level of care,” added Grady.

Rather than compensating for variability downstream, manufacturers are shifting focus towards optimizing cellular starting material—shortening development timelines and improving consistency, which, from the panelists' comments, is a welcome pivot.

“At the start, it was always the process, the product—manufacturing had to fix any deficiencies in cell collections. That’s changed. People are starting more and more to see cell collections as a piece of the manufacturing process that you can optimize,” said Smith.

He continued: “Do you really have to spend seven years optimizing a manufacturing process… if you had just started with optimized starting material? It’s an interesting time, and I’m really happy to see both sides of the equation starting to talk to each other more.”

Finally, panelists acknowledged the role of portability innovations in making collections more feasible.  “A shout out to Terumo—years ago, you did the research and published SOPs on moving an Optia device around. That’s been key to portability and taking the burden off each center,” said Cap.

“Now, with a mobile bus, we’re really putting that to the test. That’s next-level portability,” added Smith. 

Allogeneic expansion and biological reality

Attention then turned to allogeneic therapies, panelists emphasized that success begins with donor relationships—but that those relationships differ from traditional blood donation models.

Scott Grady noted that, while donor engagement remains foundational, allogeneic collections often require new approaches. “Just like blood donation, it all starts with building relationships with donors,” he said. “But from a blood center perspective, this is a different way of interacting with donors. In our case, we didn’t start with our traditional geographic footprint. Instead, we focused on regions with the quality and regulatory environments needed to support clinical trials, since much of the allogeneic space is still there."

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Panelists also cautioned against oversimplifying donor biology. Variability between donors is unavoidable, and no single profile fits all needs.

“There is no such thing as a super donor,” Munoz said. “It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution.”

Grady added that developers often refine requirements over time: “Sometimes they don’t even know what they need until later on down the road. Scientists love to science.”

Smith framed success in allogeneic therapies as a supply challenge: “For allogeneic, it’s kind of like, how do you almost maintain a security of supply? This is the raw material for a drug product.”

Cap highlighted a longstanding concern among blood centers—that recruiting donors for biotherapies could undermine traditional volunteer donor bases—but said that perspective is shifting.

“There’s been a lot of concern over the years about whether recruiting donors for biotherapies could damage the volunteer donor base,” she said. “What’s been exciting is recognizing that we’re not targeting the same donors. We’re engaging broader populations and thinking differently about how we reach, communicate with, and retain them.”

Munoz stressed that diversity is a key consideration and ongoing challenge. “Diversity in clinical trials is still very limited, and donor diversity is limited as well,” she said. “Working together across centers and geographies will ultimately strengthen development as programs move into pivotal phases and help expand patient access in the future.”

The need for a stronger feedback loop

Several panelists noted a lack of transparency across the advanced therapy value chain. Collection sites, manufacturers, and developers often operate in isolation.

“They never have the full value chain all connected,” Grady said. “Give us a little peek behind the curtain.”

Smith reinforced the importance of integration, highlighting the need for a feedback loop between collection and manufacturing: “If we open up and kind of share and have a dialog about it, we’re going to get there faster.”