Cerus Corporation Celebrates World Blood Donor Day 2021

Cerus Corporation (Nasdaq: CERS), a leader in safeguarding the global blood supply, is proud to announce its celebration of this year’s World Blood Donor Day.

World Blood Donor Day, first established by the World Health Organization in 2005, highlights the critical role safe blood and blood products play in treating a wide variety of patients throughout the world and recognizes the donors who help make these products regularly available. As blood centers compete for the time and attention of donors around the globe, the pool of donors remains relatively small. This year’s “Give blood and keep the world beating” campaign reinforces the global call for more people, especially younger demographics, all over the world to donate blood regularly and contribute to better health.

According to the WHO, more than 118.5 million blood donations are collected each year worldwide with 40% collected in high-income countries, which is home to 16% of the global population and typically has an older pool of regular donors.¹ In the U.S., only 5% of eligible donors present for donation and among that group, roughly one-fifth are subsequently deferred.²

“World Blood Donor Day is an annual reminder of the teamwork that exists between blood centers and the donors who are so critical in supplying blood products for patients in need around the globe,” stated William ‘Obi’ Greenman, president and chief executive officer of Cerus Corporation. “As we saw over the last year, disruptions in the blood supply create a significant strain on health systems and their patients who rely on these lifesaving therapeutics. At Cerus, we are focused on providing blood centers with an ‘always on’ technology that will protect patients from known and unknown contaminants and expand donor eligibility.”

June 2021 also marks 40 years since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported on five cases of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, in a Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.³ While acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) and the underlying human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) would not be defined and fully understood for several more years, this report is widely viewed as the first official description of AIDS.

“The AIDS pandemic was the impetus for Cerus,” stated Dr. Laurence Corash, Cerus’ chief scientific officer and co-founder. “With over 75 million cases and 32 million deaths over the last four decades, HIV/AIDS fundamentally changed medicine, and in particular, transfusion medicine. While the development of testing has helped restore security to the blood supply against HIV/AIDS, in the years since, there have been several other novel pathogens that have emerged. With COVID-19 as the most recent, we are constantly reminded that the blood supply needs protection from a wide range of pathogens, including those that have not yet been identified.”