Canadian Blood Services CEO defends Grifols partnership after deaths of two donors

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Canadian Blood Services signed a deal with Grifols in 2022 to work together to collect plasma, a golden-coloured fluid found in blood that is used to make certain medicines. Shay Conroy/The Globe and Mail

Canadian Blood Services chief executive officer Graham Sher defended the charity’s partnership with private blood-plasma collector Grifols after the deaths of two donors , saying he believed the company would fix deficiencies discovered by Health Canada inspectors.

CBS signed a deal with Spanish pharmaceutical company Grifols in 2022 to work together to collect plasma, a golden-coloured fluid found in blood that is used to make certain medicines. The two run separate networks of collection sites and differ in their models: Grifols pays donors while CBS does not.

Grifols has come under scrutiny in recent months after two donors in Winnipeg died. Health Canada has said it found “no linkage” between the deaths and the donation process, although The Globe and Mail recently reported that in one of the deaths, alerts sounded on the donation machine that should have led to the donation being cancelled, according to the machine’s operating manual.

At an open CBS board meeting on Thursday, Dr. Sher received a few questions from advocacy groups and members of the public about the charity’s deal with Grifols.

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He played down the concerns and said he believed that the private company had high standards.

“Yes, it is true that Health Canada found a number of non-compliances in a number of the Grifols sites, but they were still licensed to operate, and Grifols is committed to addressing the deficiencies that were found by Health Canada,” Dr. Sher said.

Health Canada inspectors have found multiple deficiencies at Grifols sites, including with staff training and supervision, according to reports obtained by The Globe , and even recently rated two clinics and Grifols’s head office as being “non-compliant” with regulations for collecting blood.

The regulator announced on April 1 it had imposed terms and conditions on Grifols’s licences for 16 of 17 locations, which included limits on the numbers of donors seen at a time and improved staff supervision.

Health Canada also said this week it has records of 27 “serious adverse reactions” from plasma donations since 2018, which would include cases of death, hospitalization and significant disability.

None of those cases were from CBS donors, two were from donors at Quebec’s non-profit collector Hema-Quebec and 25 incidents involved donors at commercial plasma collectors, all of which are now owned by Grifols. (Many of those incidences occurred before Grifols bought the sites from Prometic in 2022 and Canadian Plasma Resources in 2023.)

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Linda Silas, president of the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions, cited those numbers in her argument that CBS should end its ties with Grifols.

“As we urged CBS many years ago alongside many others within civil society, the for-profit plasma industry should never have been welcomed to operate in Canada,” Ms. Silas said.

Tracy Glynn, national director of projects and operations for the Canadian Health Coalition, a public advocacy organization, urged CBS’s board to release the agreement it signed with Grifols. “Was donor safety and training of staff included in the contract? Has the conduct of Grifols already violated terms of the contract?” she asked.

Grifols told The Globe in an unsigned statement that it is committed to Canada over the long term and has invested more than $1-billion in its network of plasma collection centres and a manufacturing facility in Montreal.

The company said it works closely with Health Canada and CBS to ensure its operations meet applicable requirements.

CBS spends about $1-billion a year on drugs made from plasma, or about two-thirds of its budget. The charity says the deal with Grifols is the only way to collect a sufficient domestic supply of plasma to meet the demand for drugs made from the fluid, principally a medicine called immunoglobulin.

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Plasma is collected from a donor into a collection bag at a Canadian Blood Services location in Scarborough in April. EDUARDO LIMA/The Globe and Mail

Dr. Sher presented data at the board meeting that said 34 per cent of Canada’s demand for immunoglobulin was made from Canadian-donated plasma, about half from Grifols and half from CBS. That is up from 15 per cent collected by CBS alone before the deal was signed.

Dr. Sher said working with Grifols was good because previous commercial collections in Canada were not used for medicines for Canadian patients.

“There was an operator that was paying donors, collecting plasma, but shipping the plasma offshore,” he said.

The previous company, Canadian Plasma Resources, told The Glo…