BHUBANESWAR: In a first, the Clinical Hematology department of Institute of Medical Sciences and SUM Hospital here has successfully conducted a haploidentical hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) on a woman suffering from acute myeloid leukemia.
Haploidentical transplant is a type of allogeneic transplant in which healthy, blood forming cells are taken from a half-matched donor to replace the unhealthy ones in the patient. The donor was the daughter of the 51-year-old patient whose human leukocyte antigens matched half of her mother.
Professor and head of the department of Clinical Hematology, Hemato Oncology and Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplant Dr Priyanka Samal said the patient displayed signs of complications after the transplantation, but those were managed aptly. It was the first successful Haplo transplant in the state which was done at a very reasonable cost, she said.
Transplantation related mortality is said to be around 30 per cent in such cases while the relapse rate was around 40 per cent. “We have been praying that she should have a smooth road ahead because there are chances of having graft-versus-host disease or GvHD, a systemic disorder which occurs when the graft’s immune cells recognise the host as foreign and attack the recipient’s body cells. But she has already crossed 45 days of the transplantation safely,” Dr Samal said.
The hospital has been conducting fully-matched sibling donor stem cell transplants but it is always difficult to find a healthy matched sibling donor (MSD) for every patient eligible for HSCT. Medical superintendent Prof Pusparaj Samantasinhar said haploidentical HSCT is available in hospitals in big cities. The same treatment is now available in IMS and SUM Hospital at lower cost, he said.