Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty's Government which international companies supply plasma products to hospitals in England.

Blood plasma supplied by NHS Blood and Transplant for transfusion to hospitals in England is either imported from Austria or comes from United Kingdom donors. Both sources are public, not privately sourced.

Blood plasma derived medicinal products are subject to medicinal regulation to assure their safety. Data are not held on the number of National Health Service patients receiving blood plasma medicinal products which may have been derived from United States donors.

The companies that supply plasma derived products to hospitals in England via NHS England’s Commercial Medicines Unit (CMU) frameworks are:

- CSL Behring;

- Grifols;

- Octapharma;

- BPL (Bio Products Laboratory);

- LFB Biomedicaments;

- Baxalta (now part of Shire); and

- Shire Pharmaceuticals.

Information is not held on supply of plasma derived medicinal products to NHS trusts outside of a CMU framework agreement.

There are a number of measures in place to ensure the safety and supply of plasma and medicinal products for patients.

All companies wishing to supply plasma derived medicinal products to hospitals in the UK have to be licensed by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). There are a series of stringent safety measures in place to prevent infections resulting from the use of medicinal products prepared from human blood or plasma, including selection of donors, screening of individual donations and plasma pools for specific markers of infection and the inclusion of effective manufacturing steps for the inactivation/removal of viruses. These measures are described in detail in the European Medicines Agency’s Guideline on plasma-derived medicinal products. A copy is attached.

The Department works closely with the MHRA, the pharmaceutical industry, NHS England and others to manage risks to the supply chain of blood plasma products to NHS patients.