Using autologous bone marrow mononuclear cells (BM-MNC) to treat patients with chronic limb ischemia has been proved safe and effective. However, processing bone marrow by Ficoll density gradient centrifugation is not only time consuming but also expensive. Manually processing of bone marrow also results in large variation in therapeutic cell quantity and quality which directly lead deviation of safety and efficacy of the cell therapy. This study is aiming to compare an automated bone marrow processing system with a conventional manual method in term of safety and efficacy.~ResQ system developed by Thermogenesis in USA provides an automatic cell processing system for bone marrow. The system takes less than 30 minutes to concentrate the therapeutic mononuclear cells including stem cells in a closed system without adding any additive such as separation reagent (Ficoll). The system also be able to be operated at point of care.~The study is designed to prove no inferior of safety and efficacy of bone marrow cells processed by ResQ to those of cells using conventional manual method. The conventional manual method is involved Ficoll density gradient centrifugation and cell washing stems in an open system. Each of test arms (ResQ vs manual method) consists of 25 patients. The primary outcome is safety which is measured by cell treatment-related adverse events. The secondary endpoints include resting ankle-brachial pressure index (ABI)and toe brachial pressure index (TBI) , transcutaneous oxygen pressure (TcPO2), claudication distance, rest pain scale evaluation, collateral vessel scale, etc.
Using autologous bone marrow mononuclear cells (BM-MNC) to treat patients with chronic limb ischemia has been proved safe and effective. However, processing bone marrow by Ficoll density gradient centrifugation is not only time consuming but also expensive. Manually processing of bone marrow also results in large variation in therapeutic cell quantity and quality which directly leads deviation of safety and efficacy of the cell therapy. This study is aiming to compare an automated bone marrow processing system with a conventional manual method in term of safety and efficacy.