Patient's stem cell used for bone marrow transplant

For the first time in Oman, a blood cancer patient's own stem cell has been used for bone marrow transplantation.

The procedure is called Autologous in medical terms and has been successfully performed on a 16-year-old girl at the Sultan Qaboos University Hospital's Bone Marrow Transplant (BMT) Unit recently.

Announcing this yesterday at a press meet, Dr Salaam Al Kindi, Deputy Director of Medical Affairs, SQU Hospital said, "So far the hospital has been performing bone marrow transplant using stem cells from a fully matched, related donor."

However, the unit successfully conducted stem cell transplant from the patient herself (Autologous) on the teenage girl suffering from Hodgkin's lymphoma that has relapsed following chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatment, which she received two years ago. According to the doctor, the girl (whose name has not been revealed) was given more intensive chemotherapy before her stem cells were collected and frozen at 80C.

"Then a more toxic regimen was administered to the patient to ablate her bone marrow and then the stem cells were infused into her again," she said.

"The aim of this kind of treatment is to give the maximum-tolerant therapy and rescue the marrow by re-infusing the collected stem cells," Dr Al Kindi stated. The girl is now well on her way to recovery and will be returning home soon.

"Although the procedure is less complex than the other one, it marks the SQU hospital's efforts to deliver high quality healthcare. The vision of the hospital is not only to teach medicine and other allied health sciences but also to deliver a high quality healthcare for the Omani people," Dr. Kindi added.