PGI to start paediatric bone marrow transplant service at Nehru Hospital

In November 2022, co-founder, president, and director of the Foundation for Primary Immunodeficiency (FPID), Dr Sudhir Gupta, who has been supporting the education, early diagnosis, genetic counselling, therapy and research of Primary Immunodeficiency Disease (PID) in both India and the US had then said that PGI, with its excellent faculty that is at par with the best in the world, needed a bone marrow transplant centre exclusively for children.

“The services here in PGI are as good as any foreign country, and in the last 12 years, the doctors at Advanced Paediatric Centre have transformed the facilities and spread awareness about PID,” Gupta had said during the national conference on Inborn Errors of Immunity that had been organised at the institute in November 2022.
Professor Biman Saikia, of the Department of Immunopathology, PGI, on his part, had explained at the same conference that bone marrow transplantation was a curative option for those with PID , and the lives of many children can be saved if they are given timely transplantation. “Approximately 150 children are waiting for this intervention and a BMT centre exclusively here at PGI for children will ease this waiting time. The centre for adults has a high number of cancer patients requiring transplantation too. But, the needs of children are different from adults,” he said.

Professor Surjit Singh, head of the Department of Paediatrics, PGI, had expressed happiness at the fact that the first BMT Centre in northern India would be opened here at PGI’s Advanced Paediatric Centre. The civil work for the centre was complete, and three consultants from the department had already received training from abroad for running the centre, he said.

“The plan is to open the centre on the 6th floor of the Advanced Paediatric Centre, with the engineering plans already having been submitted and the matter already taken up in our committees. Right now, bone marrow transplants are happening in adults. But children need a different approach. Very few centres in the country are doing such transplants, and the cost here at PGI is a fraction of what it is outside,” Professor Singh had said during the November conference.