Therapeutic Apheresis Program

During apheresis, your child's blood is safely removed from their body and separated into various components, such as white cells, red cells and plasma. The healthy parts of your child's blood are then returned to their body, and the disease-provoking elements are removed.

How Apheresis Can Help Your Child

Apheresis is used to treat a variety of conditions. Plasma exchange may be used to treat your child's autoimmune diseases or neurologic conditions. Red cell exchanges may be used to treat complications due to sickle cell disease. Extracorporeal photopheresis is used to treat acute and chronic graft versus host disease following bone marrow transplant.

Your child's physician may consult our team to help determine if apheresis is the right treatment. If you are a referring provider, we recommend that patients be seen by Children's National providers in your specialty to help determine if apheresis can be added to their care plan.

Learn more about the different types of therapeutic apheresis that we provide.

Children’s National Therapeutic Apheresis Services

Our Therapeutic Apheresis Program is staffed with experts that work together to develop personalized treatment plans for your child that draw from the most innovative therapies available.

Highlights of our program include:

• Skilled treatment team. The level of care that your child will receive is unmatched. Our team members are specialized in transfusion medicine and are engaged in prestigious national societies, including the American Society for Apheresis (ASFA), the American Society of Hematology (ASH) and AABB. Meet our team.
• Accredited program. Our program is accredited by the Foundation for the Accreditation of Cellular Therapy (FACT), which requires adherence to the highest standards of care. We use advanced equipment to ensure the safety of your child, especially if they are critically ill.
• Safety assurance. Our program strives to provide quality, evidence-based care, using methods and techniques that ensure the safety of our smallest patients.
• Research. Our team contributes to collaborative research in order to better understand the role of apheresis as a therapeutic modality in your child's care. In addition, our team supports the ongoing research aims of other Children’s National investigators by collecting cellular products from patients, which may be transformed through CAR-T technology or other cellular manipulations to provide investigational therapies to our sickest patients.
• Leaders in apheresis training. We train fellows from the National Institutes of Health, Georgetown Hospital and George Washington University Hospital on how to better understand the nuances of pediatric apheresis.