RIYADH: Saudis have been urged to join the stem cell register as there is a need for matching donors at home and abroad, the Saudi Press Agency reported.
In Saudi Arabia, 30 percent of adult patients and 60 percent of pediatrics’ patients cannot find a matching family donor, according to the King Abdullah International Medical Research Center.
Stem cell transplantation is used to treat many life-threatening diseases such as leukemia and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Dr. Firas Al-Freih, head of the stem cell donors’ register at King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research Centre, said a young Saudi woman on the register had donated her cells to a patient in a US hospital.
The doctor said it took two months to deliver the Saudi woman’s stem cells to the US patient. The hospital ran tests for safety and to ensure she was a match. The process of collecting her stem cells took 30 minutes.
He stressed the importance of international cooperation in the field of stem cell exchange, as 24 Saudi patients had received donations from overseas thanks to a global bone marrow register.
He called on everyone to join the national stem cell donors register, saying it had contributed to finding matching donors for 37 Saudi patients in the Kingdom since launching in 2016.
Dr. Majed Al-Fayyad, executive supervisor general at the hospital, said that Saudi Arabia became part of the global bone marrow register at the start of 2019 and that there were 71,000 Saudis and residents on the Kingdom’s donors’ register.
He said the register had been receiving letters from international centers in the US, UK and Italy that specialized in stem cell transplants.
Al-Fayyad said the first instance of cooperation between the hospital and the American National Donor Marrow Program (NMDP) dated back to 2005.
from Saudi Arabia http://bit.ly/2UxYSIV
via Latest News of Dubai
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