Increased immunosuppressive treatment combined with unrelated umbilical cord blood infusion in children with severe aplastic anemia
Joleen Vargas
BIO 2402- W03 M-F 8am-11:50am
Mrs. M. Gomez
June 30, 2014

It may take years for someone to discover a cure for deadliest diseases to humans. Even so, it might not work for every patient since every human in the world are not equally the same. Scientists have to go thru trial and error experiments before they can get close to success. Sometimes experiments do not have an equal amount of patients to back up results. In that case more experiments undergo to find a cure to certain disease. Severe aplastic anemia is a low count of all blood cells which include white blood cells, platelets, and red blood cells. Overall there is a failure in the bone marrow development. A patient with this class of disorder has a very weakened immune system and cannot produce enough white blood cells to fight any foreign cells. In this article researchers wanted to prove that a treatment called IST (immunosuppressive therapy) to be increased combined with unrelated umbilical cord blood will produce better responses and lower relapses rates than patients just receiving the immunosuppressive therapy alone. This is another route for patients with severe aplastic anemia that lack a compatible donor for transplantation. In the experiment, they had the controlled group of 20 children (ages ranged 3-15) receiving only the standard immunosuppressive therapy for 2 years. The experimental group had 36 children (ages ranged 2-17) receiving the increased immunosuppressive therapy plus the unrelated umbilical cord blood infused for a 6 years. They also were introducing a r-ATG (rabbit-derived antibodies) and h-ATG (horse-derived antibodies) to both groups that way it will work against human T-cells; which is used in the prevention and treatment of acute rejection in organ transplantation and therapy of aplastic anemia. The study was proving that they were getting better results with the increased therapy combined with umbilical cord blood but they were getting side of effects with this treatments. Some were getting headaches and some were getting rashes. One patient died at day 10, with side effects of skin rash, joint pain, and a fever at day 3 after rabbit ATG infusion. They realized that there wasn't no difference with infusion on the r-ATG or h-ATG in groups. The survival rates were IST plus UCB was 83.3% while the IST group was 45.5%. The ending results there were some patients that we getting