Customer Profile: Etablissement Français du Sang – Alsace (EFS Alsace)

Production Profile
The Etablissement Français du Sang (EFS) Alsace in Strasbourg provides blood components for public hospitals and private clinics for a region of approximately 2 million people in eastern France. EFS Alsace maximizes organizational efficiency by leveraging a single approved system to inactivate pathogens in both platelet and plasma components with the INTERCEPT Blood System™. Adoption of INTERCEPT allowed EFS Alsace to optimize its ratio of buffy coat to apheresis platelet production, thus realizing cost savings for the organization. The system was implemented without modification to employee work hours or delay to component availability.

Production Lab
INTERCEPT processing at EFS Alsace requires less than 20m².  Four illuminators provide the center with flexibility to treat 100% of their platelet and plasma collections.  Locating the INTERCEPT treatment area proximate to the platelet preparation room maximizes the center’s efficiency.

INTERCEPT Workflow
As depicted below, EFS Alsace has leveraged the wide processing parameters of INTERCEPT to develop a workflow that best meets their production demands and personnel work schedules.  Furthermore, the center’s introduction of INTERCEPT plasma eliminated the need for quarantine plasma which has resulted in a 10-fold increase in plasma inventory and increased their production flexibility.

INTERCEPT QC Results
Beginning in 2006 when they introduced INTERCEPT, EFS Alsace has maintained a rigorous QC program in order to ensure the final blood product characteristics are in compliance with national requirements.  The tables below include Alsace’s QC data for INTERCEPT treated apheresis platelets, buffy coat platelets, and apheresis plasma.  The buffy coat platelet data (Table 2) includes results from both manually prepared buffy coats (pools of 6) and those prepared with the TACSI system (pools of 5).