My dream is to give Mom the gift of life -- in the form of a bone marrow donor.
Of the millions of people with sickle-cell disease in the world, only some 300 have received a bone marrow transplant because of age (doctors won't perform the procedure on patients 16 years and older) and donor-matching problems.
One of her patients needs 5, 000 units of Epogen, a bone-marrow stimulant and one of the costliest drugs in the hospital formulary.
The number of Jewish bone marrow donors registered with a charity has risen by 985% as a result of a campaign to save a terminally ill woman.
The only outright cure is still a harrowing bone marrow transplant, but Gleevec sends the vast majority of CML patients into long-lasting remission.
It is now increasingly used as a treatment for multiple myeloma, a cancer of the bone marrow.
The first solid evidence implicating stem cells in cancer came in the early 1990s when John Dick, a stem cell researcher at the University of Toronto, developed a method for transplanting cancerous human bone marrow cells into mice.
Kubert died Sunday of multiple myeloma, a cancer that attacks bone marrow, said Mike Chen, the academic director of the Kubert School in Dover, New Jersey.
Macchiarini performed the nine-hour operation on April 9 at the Children's Hospital of Illinois after carefully creating the windpipe using stem cells from Hannah's bone marrow that were saturated over a matrix of plastic fibers shaped into a tube.
That search is conducted largely through the National Marrow Donor Program, which maintains a registry of bone-marrow donors.
The top item on the bucket list was the hope that everyone in the UK would sign up as a bone marrow donor, an aspiration which Prime Minister David Cameron praised in the House of Commons.
In long-term use it carries a one in 30, 000 risk of a serious side effect - the bone marrow disorder aplastic anaemia.
Ann O'Leary, head of register development at The Anthony Nolan Trust, a charity which helps find matches for people who need a bone marrow transplant, said the impact of Alice's campaign "could not be over-estimated".
If a match is found the donation of bone marrow involves the removal of stem cells from the hip bone.
He also received bone marrow from the deceased donor of his arms, a therapy intended to help his body accept the new limbs with minimal medication.
One recent case: a small child in Wisconsin who suffered through more than 100 surgeries before sequencing identified the cause of his illness and allowed doctors to prescribe a bone marrow transplant as treatment.
This might be one reason why India, the world's second-largest nation, has a bone marrow registry of 39, 000 people, according to DATRI, a nonprofit organization which drives and maintains registries worldwide.
The first, an adult man known as the Berlin patient, was cured as a result of a 2007 bone-marrow transplant.
For regeneration to continue, stem cells from both the bone marrow and the heart itself must be coaxed to grow a second layer of tissue that is necessary for the formation of arteries, which are bigger and thicker than capillaries.
Tissue from the cord of new born babies is being recycled by doctors to help patients who need a bone marrow transplant, but who cannot find a match.
Sixty percent of myeloma patients die within five years, but Giusti beat the odds, living for a decade and a half through multiple rounds of drug therapy and a bone marrow transplant from her twin sister.
If she had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, fought through rounds of chemo and radiation to no avail, and decided against a bone marrow transplant (which, in this hypothetical situation, which reflects the vast majority of real cases, would more likely kill her than enable a cure) she would be honored and remembered as noble, virtuous and brave.
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The odds were best with a donor of his ethnicity, and there were few South Asians in the national bone-marrow database.
Geneticist Elizabeth Worthey worked on the first-ever treatment of a patient based on DNA sequencing, helping doctors decide to give a bone marrow transplant to a 6-year-old boy who had suffered through more than a hundred operations.
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The 38-year-old was outraged that no bed had been available on Monday in the hospital's bone marrow unit for her partner, who has non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a form of lymphatic cancer.
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