Bone marrow transplantation, also known as hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, is the medical procedure by which a damaged bone marrow is replaced with a healthy bone marrow, in order to restore normal blood cell production.
It is a very delicate, complex treatment that is performed only under certain conditions; among these, we note: an optimal patient's state of health (in spite of the illness that afflicts him) and the impracticability (because ineffective) of any other alternative treatment.
Usually performed in cases of aplastic anemia, leukemia, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and genetic blood diseases, bone marrow transplantation can be autologous or allogeneic . Autologous means that the bone marrow is taken directly from the patient to be treated; allogeneic, on the other hand, means that the bone marrow comes from a compatible donor.
The first bone marrow transplantation experiments were held in the 1950s at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in the United States. The team of doctors and researchers led by E. Donnall Thomas performed them .
Donnall Thomas, together with his collaborators, worked on the procedure for about twenty years, up until the 1970s, increasingly perfecting the operating technique. All these efforts were, rightly, rewarded with the Nobel Prize for Medicine, in 1990 .
In Europe, the first bone marrow transplant occurred in 1959, by a French oncologist named Georges Mathé . Five Yugoslav workers from the Nuclear Vinca Institute in Belgrade underwent surgery.
Mathé is still considered a pioneer in the treatment of leukemia.
The first successful bone marrow transplant, on a patient with a non-neoplastic blood disease, dates back to 1968 : it was done by Robert A. Good, in Minnesota (United States).
Seven years later, in 1975, John Kersey, also in Minnesota, successfully performed the first bone marrow transplant on a patient with lymphoma. This patient, who was 16 at the time, is still a woman alive: she is the longest living transplanted bone marrow.
