Bone Marrow Transplant Center Opens
By Irina Titova
Staff Writer
|
|
Sergey Grachev / The St. Petersburg Times
Axel Fauser and Boris Afanasiyev examining the new clinic's first-ever patient, leukemia sufferer Alexander Yevstigneyev.
|
Alexander Yevstigneyev has leukemia, and is preparing for a bone marrow transplant next week at the first facility of its kind in St. Petersburg. The new Russian-German Transplant Clinic, which opened in July, operates as an adjunct to the Hematology Center of St. Petersburg State Medical University, and Yevstigneyev is its first patient. His donor lives in Germany, but, for standard ethical reasons, that is all the information Yevs tigneyev has been given about her. But such mysterious details don't bother him or his mother, Lyudmila. "I am hoping for the best," said Yev stig neyev, 20, for whom chemotherapy is proving less and less effective and who made the journey from Yakutia for his transplant operation. "We didn't find any matching relative in our family for the transplant," said Lyudmila Yevstigneyeva. "And I'm glad that now we have such strong hope that the bone marrow of his donor will help." The $900,000 clinic was built thanks to funds from the German-based European Institute for the Support and Development of Transplant Strategies. It is the brainchild of the institute's medical director, professor Axel Fauser, professor Boris Afanasiyev, head of the St. Petersburg Hematology Center, and director of St. Petersburg State Medical University, Nikolai Yaitsky. The trio had planned a clinic for three years. Bone marrow transplant is intended to cure serious cases of leukemia, cancer, and some genetically inborn diseases such as immuno-deficiency syndrome. The first bone marrow transplant was performed in 1968, and it became a bright ray of hope for patients who were desperate to stop their cancer by methods other than the painful and sometimes short-lived effects of chemotherapy. Since that time, transplant operations have developed into three major branches: auto transplants, when doctors transplant healthy marrow from the patient's own body; relative transplants, marrow taken from a genetically matching relative; and genetically matching marrow taken from a non-relative. The first two types of transplants are already well established in Russian medicine, and staff at the new center have performed hundreds of them in various clinics in the city. But patients are often unable to find a matching relative. So if the technology has been around for three decades, why did it take Russia so long to catch on? "There was previously a lack of essential facilities for such a complicated operation," said Afanasiyev, "and we didn't have our own donor files, so we weren't allowed access to the international database." Secondly, he said, the financial help of the German side was needed to get the clinic off the ground. Although there are about 3,000 operations of this type performed worldwide every year, 50 patients is a big enough number for the Russian clinic to deal with, said Fauser. For most Russians, the operation is prohibitively expensive, costing around $50,000 to $70,000 all-inclusive - operation, donor search and transportation of the marrow. The German side is covering between 30 to 50 percent of the costs, with the rest being met by the Russian government and sponsorship from either businesses or private individuals. It's not a risk-free process, according to both Afanasiyev and Fauser, who said that an operation has about a 70 percent chance of success. But that easily beats the 20 percent success rate for long-term chemotherapy patients. Afanasiyev and Fauser said that the main task ahead was to build up the Russian donor database. "In the West, there is a lot of publicity [asking for] donors to come forward," said Fauser. Afanasiyev said that he and his colleagues had organized a "donor day" in May, and had another planned for three days, starting on Oct. 17.
|
Перевести на русский
Print this article
