For months, doctors in Michigan had been searching for a bone marrow donor for a 68-year-old African American patient. She had been treated for acute myeloid leukemia once before, but the fast-growing blood cancer came back. A bone marrow transplant, in which healthy donor stem cells replace a patient’s unhealthy marrow, was her best chance at survival.
A donor must have closely matched genes for human leukocyte antigens, or HLA, to be considered compatible. “The issue is that it is difficult to find a fully matched donor for minorities,” says Muneer Abidi, an oncologist at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, who led the patient’s care.
The team turned to Ossium Health,