The Blood Donor Center collects blood products for University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics (UIHC) patients. We encourage donations of whole blood or blood components via apheresis at our fixed site. We also collect whole blood at mobile blood drives in the community as part of our community engagement efforts.
The Blood Bank processes and stores blood products for transfusion to UIHC. We perform moderate and high complexity diagnostic testing related to transfusion.
The Patient Services unit performs therapeutic apheresis, therapeutic phlebotomy, and extracorporeal photopheresis. We also collect hematopoietic stem cells and mononuclear cells from healthy donors and patients. These cells are used for hematopoietic stem cell transplant, or shipment to manufacturers of cellular therapies such as dendritic cell vaccines and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells.
Tissue and Cellular Therapies provides specialized human tissue for surgical implantation. We also process hematopoietic stem cell, bone marrow, and mononuclear cell collections for hematopoietic stem cell transplantation as well as treatment of a wide variety of other clinical disorders.
COVID-19 plasma study
Patients who are severely ill with COVID-19 may benefit from receiving plasma infusions from donors who have recovered from the disease and are proven to no longer be infected.
DeGowin Donor Center has a program to obtain plasma from patients who have recovered from COVID-19 and are willing to donate plasma to treat seriously affected COVID-19 patients. This plasma has antibodies against the virus which may be beneficial to patients who have active disease.
How to participate
Subjects who have confirmed diagnosis of COVID-19 AND have been asymptomatic for 14 or more days may be eligible to participate.
Subjects who feel they have recovered from COVID-19 but did not have their diagnosis confirmed by lab testing may also be eligible, if they had close personal (lived with) contact with someone who was confirmed to have COVID-19.
For these subjects to participate they would need to be asymptomatic for 28 days and then be tested for COVID-19 antibodies. If positive they may be eligible to donate plasma.
If you or someone you know falls into either of these categories and is interested in the study please contact us at PathologyCP@healthcare.uiowa.edu or call our study coordinator at 1-319-678-7922.