LAHORE: The Lahore General Hospital (LGH) has established a ‘bone bank’, the first-ever such facility in any public sector teaching hospital of Punjab, and second in the country after the one in the Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation (SIUT), with the prime objective of reconstructing bone defects and use in transplantation.
The initiative is declared a milestone in registering, processing, preserving, distributing and storing bone allografts -- tissue grafts from a donor of the same species as the recipient but not genetically identical.
The monitoring authority of the Punjab Human Organ Transplant Authority (P-HOTA) accorded approval to the project.
A senior doctor says that the prime object of the bone bank is to collect, process and store bone tissue for use in future surgical and transplant procedures.
It is vital for providing allogeneic bone grafts, used when a patient requires bone material due to a defect in his own or for a revision surgery.
The process involves surgically extracting a bone, screening it for any disease, and then processing and storing it through methods like freezing or freeze-drying.
Sharing the background perspective of the facility, the senior doctor says that the first modern bone bank was established in the USA in 1949, driven by the need to address bone defects from war injuries. Since then, he says, bone banks have been established in various countries, such as India in 1988 and Pakistan in 2015 at the Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation (SIUT).
The LGH bone bank is the first such facility in Punjab, established and made functional following years-long efforts made under the supervision of senior orthopedic surgeon and head of the unit, Prof Dr Mian Mohammad Hanif.
Prof Hanif’s work in orthopedics includes his contributions to the new Pain Clinic at the LGH. He has specialised in areas like arthritis management, back pain and bone fractures.
The senior medic says that the newly established facility will raise the confidence of the orthopedic surgeons in the use of bone allografts.
The facility will allow the surgeons at the LGH to retrieve the bones from patients and preserve the same in the bone bank for later use in hip, knee joint replacements, foot bones reconstruction and other such purposes.
The department will also collect bone donations, he says, adding that the LGH has opened a way forward for the other government sector teaching hospitals to also excel in this specialty.To a question, he says, the orthopedic department had forwarded the case to P-HOTA for approval after completing all the required formalities.
The P-HOTA team paid many visits to examine the bone bank’s processes which involved a rigorous questionnaire for choosing donors, a complete bacteriological and serological examination, as well as standard practices for registering, processing, preserving, distributing, and storing bone allografts.
The authority accorded approval to the LGH facility when it found out the bank had also a strict control over all stages, including the formation of well-trained harvesting teams, processing techniques, safety of transplanted tissues, and the required standards for bone bank operation, Prof Hanif says.
Published in Dawn, November 25th, 2025
