News and Events

Teenager marks first year after successful double cord blood transplant

Date: 08. 2007

Source: Julia Ng, Aug 28, 2007; Published by Channel NewsAsia

SINGAPORE: It has been a year since Nanyang Polytechnic student Candy Yeow received a successful double cord blood transplant for acute leukaemia. The 19-year-old was diagnosed with Philadelphia positive acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, which is dubbed the worst type of leukaemia because very few survive it. But Candy's doctor from the Singapore General Hospital found two matching units of cord blood from an overseas cord blood bank for her transplant. The rather uncommon double cord blood transplant went well, and gave Candy a new lease of life, after battling months of giddy spells, nausea, hair loss and feebleness from chemotherapy. Now a year since her transplant, Candy's cancer is in complete remission, and she is off all immuno-suppressants. Being back in school, she said, "I'm very happy to go back to school because I've deferred for a year and it was quite painful not to study and just do nothing," A bone marrow transplant requires near-perfect matching of tissues, while a 75 per cent match is good enough for a cord blood transplant. According to Dr Mickey Koh, consultant haematologist of Singapore General Hospital, the hospital has access to the cord blood unit, but bone marrow donation usually depends on volunteer donors' willingness to come forward. "The main problem with doing a cord blood transplant in an adult setting, however, is that cord blood still has far too few stem cells that are sufficient to engraft in an adult patient. And that's why in this instance we went to do a double cord blood transplant to get the requisite number of stem cells to engraft in Candy," said Dr Koh. - CNA/ac