Lymphopheresis is a procedure that employs the same principle of apheresis wherein instead of removing whole blood from the donor, only a selected blood component is removed, and the remaining blood and plasma are returned to the donor.
This procedure is beneficial for those individuals who have rare blood types, so rare that when they need a blood transfusion, only a selected number of individuals can donate a blood component for them. Apheresis found its use in the removal and pooling of platelets from whole blood, resulting in a higher yield of platelets. In this article, we are focused on the removal of a type of white blood cell, the ones which are responsible for fighting off viral infections, the lymphocytes. Thus the term lymphopheresis.