Paras Hospitals, Gurugram, has launched an advanced three-bedded Bone Marrow Transplant (BMT) unit with cutting-edge facilities and expert medical staff of haemato-oncologists, BMT physicians and trained nursing staff. Dr (Col) R Ranga Rao, Chairman, Paras Cancer Centre, Paras Hospitals, said, “Most cancer patients in India require transplant, but there are inadequate centres. As a result, the existing facilities are expensive, which most of the patients cannot afford.
Therefore, they don’t go for it despite knowing that transplant is the only cure. The new BMT unit will offer world-class facilities to patients with support throughout the treatment from evaluation and preparation to the bone marrow transplant procedure followed by long-term monitoring after the transplant. The BMT unit will have facilities for both autologous and allogeneic transplants.”
The BMT Unit will cater to patients with blood cancer including leukemia, lymphoma and myeloma as well as other haematological disorders like thalassaemia, aplastic anaemia, sickle-cell disease and inherited immune deficiency disorders.
“BMT is a life-saving procedure and is the only way to cure many of the patients diagnosed with a blood cancer. BMT involves taking a patient’s damaged or destroyed bone marrow stem cells and replacing them with healthy stem cells from a donor. In autologous transplants, BMT uses the patient’s own blood cells, while allogenic transplants use cells from a matched donor,” adds Rao, who has an extensive experience in BMT.
The three-bedded filtered rooms have an Air Handling Unit to ensure infection control, as bone marrow transplant patients are prone to infections. “A separate laminar flow for sterile chemotherapy preparation is dedicated to the transplant patients for infection control,” says Rao.
“Many children in India suffer from life-threatening genetic disorders like thalassaemia and aplastic anaemia. They have defected haemoglobin and by their 7th birthday, they need transplants either from a sibling or donor. This is how we allow the child to have a normal life span otherwise they have to survive on blood transfusions all the time,” adds Dr Rao.