Paras Hospitals Gurugram Makes New Addition to its Cancer Centre

Gurugram: Paras Hospitals Gurugram, a leading multi-speciality tertiary care hospital, today launched an advanced 3-bedded Bone Marrow Transplant (BMT) unit, which is using cutting-edge facilities and expert medical staff of haemato-oncologists, BMT Physician and trained nursing staff. The new unit, a part of Paras Cancer Centre, will bring international standards of cancer care to offer patients from Gurugram and surrounding areas by providing an accessible facility for bone marrow transplant to adults and children.

The BMT Unit will cater to patients with blood cancer including leukemia, lymphoma and myeloma as well as other hematological disorders like thalassemia, aplastic anemia, sickle cell disease and inherited immune deficiency disorders. Bone Marrow Transplant is a life-saving procedure and is the only way to cure many of the patients diagnosed with a blood cancer. BMT involves taking a patient's damaged or destroyed bone marrow stem cells and replacing them with healthy stem cells from a donor. BMT can be autologous or allogenic. Autologous transplants use the patient’s own blood cells, while allogenic transplants use cells from a matched donor.

The BMT unit was inaugurated by Dr (Col) R Ranga Rao, Chairman, Paras Cancer Centre, Paras Hospitals, Gurugram
Dr (Col) R Ranga Rao, who has a massive amount of experience with all types of BMT, said,  “Mostly cancer patient in India requires transplant and the transplant centres are not adequate. As they are inadequate in numbers, the facilities are that expensive, which patients mostly can’t afford. Therefore, they don’t go for it despite it being the only hope for their cure. The new BMT unit will offer world-class facilities to patients with support throughout the treatment from evaluation and preparation to the bone marrow transplant procedure followed by long-term monitoring after the transplant. The BMT unit will have facilities for both autologous and allogenic transplants.”

The 3-bedded filtered rooms each have a dedicated Air Handling Unit to ensure strict infection control, as it’s quite common in bone marrow transplant patients.  A separate laminar flow for sterile chemotherapy preparation is dedicated to the transplant patients for infection control.

“Paras can perform various kind of transplant now here. There is a cost and myth regarding the procedure. Despite the requirement, the availability of such centers is very low. Once you have more and more availability, the cost comes down and then more people can avail it. We are giving this treatment at a reasonable cost for both our domestic and international patients. There are many children in India suffering from life-threatening genetic disorders like Thalassemia, Aplastic anemia. They have defected hemoglobin and by the time they celebrate their 7th birthday, they need transplants either with their sibling or from a donor. This is how we allow the child to have a normal life span otherwise they have to surviving on blood transfusions all the time,” Dr Rao added.

Bone Marrow Transplant is a complex procedure and requires teamwork between multiple specialties including transfusion medicine, clinical hematology, pathology, immunology, and pharmacology. The highly experienced doctors of Paras Hospitals are supported by the advanced infrastructure and technology and they offer treatment at par with international standards.