A Catholic health care system in the American Midwest has successfully completed the world’s first reported bone marrow transplant to treat a non-malignant disease.
Doctors at Franciscan Health used bone marrow recovered from a deceased organ donor to treat a 40-year-old woman with aplastic anemia
The patient, with a decade-long history of the disease, received the bone marrow stem cell transplant on April 18, after her disease progressed from stable to severe, despite multiple lines of therapy.
Because her disease no longer responded to medication, her care team pursued a transplant to replace her failing marrow with healthy blood-forming stem cells.
Six months after the transplant, the donor marrow has taken hold and restored her blood counts.
She no longer needs blood or platelet transfusions and has achieved full donor chimerism, meaning her blood and immune system are now produced entirely by the donor’s stem cells, without complications.
For non-malignant conditions including severe aplastic anemia, sickle cell disease, beta thalassemia, and other inherited or acquired bone marrow failure disorders, bone marrow-derived stem cells are widely regarded as the preferred stem cell source over peripheral blood stem cells (PBSCs), and the source of choice for non-malignant diseases.
“Bone marrow transplantation for severe aplastic anemia has been performed since the 1970s using living related and unrelated donors.
“To our knowledge, this is the first reported transplant of deceased organ donor bone marrow for severe aplastic anemia,” said Felix Mensah, MD, the treating physician at Franciscan Health.
“This case shows why continued innovation in transplant medicine matters, and why we need more donor options, so that every patient with a life-threatening bone marrow failure disorder has access to potentially curative therapy.”
“Reaching the first non-malignant transplant is a defining moment,” said Kevin Caldwell, Co-Founder and CEO of Ossium, which maintains a marrow bank.
“By recovering and banking bone marrow from organ donors, we can consistently optimize treatment outcomes.”
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Ossium plans to support the transplantation of additional patients with both malignant and non-malignant diseases over the course of this year through its HOPE Program, continuing to expand access to deceased donor bone marrow as a graft source for conditions where it offers clear clinical advantages.
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