Daniel Kraft invents a better way to harvest bone marrow

Daniel Kraft is a paediatric cancer doctor and stem-cell researcher at Stanford University where his clinical focus has been bone marrow transplantation. Bone marrow is actually what we use to save the lives of thousands of patients.

Few years ago, he was doing a transplant at Stanford. He was in the operating room; he had a person there, who was a volunteer donor. He took the needle, punch it into the hard bone and aspirate about 10 millimetres of bone marrow out, each time, with a syringe. After that he handed it to the nurse, she dropped it to a tin and handed it back to him. They repeated this about 200 times, and by the end the bone of the patient looked like Swiss cheese.

After few months he made up a new device, called Marrow Miner. This device can aspirate rich bone marrow very quickly trough one hole, and no robots are required. He experimented with other animals and he was astonished: he got 10 times the stem cell activity in the marrow from the Marrow Miner, compared to the normal device. With this technology more people will donate them stem cells, and more people will be saved.