Submitted by Charlotte Lin
Kevin Caldwell, Ossium cofounder and CEO
Ossium Health pioneered a way to cryopreserve bone marrow and completed more than two dozen successful transplants. Now it wants to scale up its technology so anyone who needs bone marrow can access it quickly.
Montrail Moore was 48 years old when he was diagnosed with leukemia last year. His doctors hoped to do a bone marrow transplant, a procedure in which healthy donor cells replace a patient’s damaged ones. But there was no match among his family or on the living donor registry.
Then Moore learned from his oncologist about a new, cutting-edge option: He could get a transplant from a deceased donor that had been cryopreserved at a biobank in Indianapolis. In January, Moore had the procedure, and his health started to improve. He now considers the transplant date his new birthday. “It gave me a new life,” he tells Forbes.
Moore’s surgery is one of 29 procedures completed with bone marrow from Ossium Health, the startup that pioneered the technology to retrieve it from deceased donors and freeze it. All of the surgeries, which were part of clinical trials or compassionate use programs, were successful. Ossium is now preparing to commercialize its bone marrow from deceased donors for blood cancers next February, and then start building out a portfolio of other stem cell therapies.
Ossium has raised $158 million from investors at a valuation of $300 million (as of its last raise in 2023). Revenue is expected to reach $35 million this year, up 75% from last year’s $20 million. Ossium cofounder and CEO Kevin Caldwell expects the number of transplants to surpass 60 next year and reach close to 200 in 2028—on the way to eventually handling 10,000-plus patients a year as the amount of bone marrow it banks increases along with doctors’ willingness to use it.
Why It Matters
“Ossium’s cryopreserved bone marrow could solve the problems with relying on living donors,” says Forbes senior editor Amy Feldman. “At least 70% of patients that need a bone-marrow transplant don’t have a family member that matches and need an unrelated donor. While doctors can search registries for a match, not all patients will find one. The odds for Black and South Asian patients are worse because of a lack of diversity among donors. Time is also a problem. Cancer patients who need treatment may not have the two to four months it can take to find a living donor. Ossium commits to getting its bone marrow to patients within 72 hours.”