NRS Medical College & Hospital Doctors have performed a Haplo identical (Half match) Bone Marrow Transplant (BMT) on a seven-year-old boy utilizing stem cells from his seventeen years old sister. This BMT is usually conducted with match donors, however, the procedure of half-matched transplant, which is more complex and challenging, is perhaps the first procedure to be done on a paediatric patient at a government-run hospital in Bengal.

The seven-year boy, Krishna Agarwal, a resident of Howrah, in February 2018, was diagnosed with acute leukaemia and treated at the Institute of child health. In the initial steps of the treatment, the boy was doing well with the chemotherapy. But the disease relapsed and the treatment stopped working in improving the symptoms. Then his parents took him to NRSMCH, which conducted the greatest number of BMTs among other government hospitals in Bengal.

With the consent of the parents, the haematology team leader Professor Sandip Saha got the sibling ready for the transplant process. “In addition to the HLA gene mismatch, the blood group of the donor and recipient, too, were not matching,” said Saha.

According to the sources, this type of procedure is only performed in a few private hospitals in the country where the cost could be anything high.

“This is such a breakthrough by Saha and his team and I hope we will continue to apply advanced medical science in the treatment of patients,” said NRSMCH principal Pit Baran Chakraborty.

After the treatment, the donor sister was discharged in five days by the hospital, and in a couple of days, the boy was sent home.