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Bone Marrow Transplant Unit
Leukemia is a killer disease. It ranks fifth among top causes of mortality in the Philippines alone—and is a painful illness affecting both adults and children.
Leukemia is a cancer of the bone marrow, where blood cells are formed. To address this disease and similar ones holistically and effectively, Makati Medical has established its Bone Marrow Transplant (BMT) Unit.
If you have aplastic anemia, lymphoma, multiple myeloma, chronic myelonous leukemia or any of the many malignant and non-malignant blood diseases, our unit is one of about three in the country that can offer you advanced Blood and Marrow Transplantation as treatment.
Our aim is to provide optimum BMT care that exceeds customer expectations. As proof of this, we currently perform 75 percent of all BMT procedures done in the country today.
Well aware that BMT is not the last resort but the front-line treatment, we encourage you to undergo the procedure during the early stages of the disease in order to increase your chances of getting well.
Like the other units of the Cancer Center, our BMT unit also embraces a multidisciplinary approach to dealing with malignant and non-malignant blood diseases. Our specialists and staff have undergone extensive training and is complemented by our fully equipped facility of the latest in BMT technologies.
In the past, if you were found to have a blood disease that required BMT, you would have to undergo a complicated and excruciatingly painful bone marrow transplant, where bone marrow would be harvested from the marrow of the pelvic bone of a donor to extract a liter or so of marrow fluid. The extracted cells were then transfused back to you, like a blood transfusion. But even before the transfusion of stem cells, you would have had endure the discomfort and pain of high doses of chemotherapy, or even total body irradiation, in order to eradicate the defective cells.
At our BMT unit, however, we use advanced equipment and technologies that have brought pain to its absolute minimum. We use an advanced Apharesis Machine programmed to harvest specific types of cells from the bone marrow—either from you, or from a donor. Because of this process, you are spared the unbearable pain of actual bone marrow transplantation, and undergo instead peripheral blood stem cell transplantation. Instead of harvesting entire marrows, the Apharesis Machine is programmed to extract only stem cells via a catheter from the donor’s femoral vein in the groin. The stem cells are then transfused back into you in either an allogeneic or autologous procedure.
In allogeneic procedures, a donor—preferably your sibling who has a 25% chance of matching your blood type—donates stem cells. In an autologous transplant, we harvest your own stem cells, store it, and use it when you need it.
For patients with acute leukemia, we conduct allogeneic transplants so that the donor’s stem cell or immune system can recognize your leukemia as foreign and attack these cancer cells.
Like the other units under our Cancer Center, our BMT unit provides advanced, yet compassionate care each patient deserves.
Our Location:
- 7th Floor, Main Building
- Telephone: +632 8888 905 or +632 8888 999 loc 7051
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