From blood donations to research: Versiti works to keep Wisconsinites healthy

If you’ve ever donated blood in Wisconsin, you may be familiar with Versiti. The organization runs dozens of blood donation centers throughout the Midwest, and here in Wisconsin, it provides more than 230,000 units of blood to hospitals annually.

But Versiti does more than blood donations — it’s also home to the Versiti Blood Research Institute, which seeks to better understand blood disorders, diagnose them and manage them. For Chris Miskell, the president and CEO of Versiti, the vision for the institute is a clear one.

“At Versiti, our mantra is that we’re saving the lives that you love. And we do that in a variety of different ways,” says Miskell. “When you make a blood donation, that’s one of our service lines where we collect, process, and distribute blood to our hospitals. And across the Midwest, it’s 385 hospitals that are relying on us to serve their patients.”

In addition to the blood donations, the research Versiti conducts is impactful. As Miskell details, the research done at the institute has resulted in a groundbreaking update in marrow donations. “There was a time when people could not have an unrelated bone marrow transplant … the person that was the donor had to be related. Versiti Blood Center of Wisconsin is the place where the work was done to figure out a solution so that people that weren’t related could be a donor and a recipient.” This allowed people needing transplants to receive them quicker and easier.

The research is nationally funded and Versiti also recruits on an international stage. Miskell hopes the broad talent and support leads to bigger breakthroughs in medicine. “The next, five to ten years, we would envision increasing the depth and the breadth of the research that we can do so that we can answer more of those questions,” says Miskell.