St. John’s Medical College has opened its haematopoietic bone marrow transplant unit claimed to be first of its kind in Karnataka. The unit is set up to provide treatment to cancer patients.

The department of Medicine division of hematology, blood bank and centre for human genetics have jointly worked towards in establishing the unit and infrastructure. No details of the investment are provided. It is a single bedded unit providing positive pressure Laminar flow and HEPA filtered air, which provides free bacteria environment.

Haematopoietic stem cell transplant is used to treat a wide variety of diseases like blood cancers, marrow failure states, myelomas, lymphomas and other conditions like auto immune diseases.

The stem cells are the primitive cells in the bone marrow, which develop into mature red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets. When a person gets leukemia, the stem cells in the bone marrow malfunction or become abnormal. Hence high doses of chemotherapy are necessary to destroy these defective and abnormal cells.

However, with these therapies, the bone marrow gets depleted as it destroys both the normal and abnormal cells. By the way of autologous haematopoietic stem cell transplantation, the bone marrow of the patient would be replaced with the normal stem cells.

The unit was inaugurated by Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, chairperson Vision Group on Biotechnology, government of Karnataka.