Word: transplant
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...Keone's dream seems about to come true, thanks to a pioneering medical treatment. Exactly a year ago last week, Keone, now 13, became the first sickle-cell patient to receive a transplant of blood cells from the umbilical cord of a newborn infant. In effect, he got a new bloodmaking system. Other young sickle-cell patients have undergone transplants, but these involved bone-marrow cells and had to be matched precisely with the recipients' own blood. In Keone's case, though, his half-sister could not offer matching marrow. So his doctors decided to turn to more easily available...
Cord-cell transplants have been performed for other blood diseases, such as leukemia, but they remain experimental and highly risky. Dr. Andrew Yeager, a transplant physician at Emory University medical school in Atlanta, warned the Penns that not only might Keone die, but there was not even more than a 50% chance the procedure would do any good. After seven years of blood transfusions that were becoming more and more painful and increasingly ineffective, Keone decided he had no other choice. "Mama, I might die anyway," he told his mother Leslie, a medical technician, who left the decision entirely...
...prepare for the transplant, Keone had to undergo nine days of chemotherapy. The object was to kill his bone marrow, the source of his sickled blood cells, as well as to neutralize his immune system so it would accept the new cells. These came from an anonymous donor at the New York Blood Center and were fed intravenously into Keone on Dec. 11 last year by Yeager and his colleagues at the AFLAC Cancer Center of Children's Healthcare of Atlanta (formerly Egleston Children's Hospital...
Though the transplant itself is a complicated procedure, the screening is relatively painless...
This blood is sent to a national database. If the marrow matches that of a patient seeking a transplant, the donor will receive a call and be asked to undergo a bone marrow extraction...