Last month, Tamil Nadu Health Minister K.G. At present, 50 patients are on the waitlist for bone marrow transplantation in T.N., he said.
Arunraj said Tamil Nadu would soon create a stem cell/bone marrow registry to facilitate bone marrow transplantation.
A stem-cell donor registry is a database of people who have voluntarily agreed to potentially donate their blood-forming stem cells to a patient in need. Their human leukocyte antigen (HLA) profile is recorded for comparison with patients looking for a suitable donor. For people living with blood cancers such as leukaemia and lymphoma, and disorders such as thalassaemia and aplastic anaemia, a stem-cell transplant can be a potentially curative treatment. But finding a suitable donor can be the first challenge. For those without a suitable family donor, an unrelated donor registry can provide another route to finding a match. The key factor in matching is HLA, rather than the blood group. HLA markers are proteins that help the immune system distinguish the body’s own cells from foreign cells. They are inherited, and a closer HLA match can improve the chances of a successful transplant and reduce complications such as graft-versus-host disease. “A registry can only help if it has donors who reflect the genetic diversity of the population. If certain communities have very few registered donors, patients belonging to those groups may face greater difficulty finding a suitable donor,” he adds. G. If the donor proceeds, stem cells can often be collected from the bloodstream through a process similar to platelet donation. In some cases, stem cells may instead be collected directly from the bone marrow. In many cases, however, blood stem-cell collection is performed through the bloodstream.
Because some potential donors associate the term ‘bone marrow donation’ with a major operation, this distinction is important. Only about 25% to 30% of patients have a fully HLA-matched sibling donor.
“The importance of registries is particularly high for patients from communities that are under-represented in existing donor databases,” Dr. Jeyasankar says. Vimal Kumar, senior consultant, paediatric haematology, oncology, blood and marrow Transplantation, MGM Cancer Institute, Chennai, says India needs more healthy young adults to register as potential donors, particularly from diverse communities.
