Memorial Cancer Institute Opens First Bone Marrow Transplant Unit In Broward

Monday, November 05 2007

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:


(Hollywood, Fla.) — Memorial Cancer Institute at Memorial Hospital West has just become the first facility in Broward County to open a bone marrow transplant unit where patients with certain kinds of blood cancers, such as leukemia, lymphoma and multiple myeloma, will be able to receive treatment.


“Chemotherapy can get rid of some cancers,” explains Lyle Feinstein, MD, hematologist/oncologist and co-director of the program with Daren Grosman, MD, hematologist/oncologist. “Unfortunately, you can also knock out the good cells with the bad. If that happens, the patient can’t produce red and white blood cells and platelets.” The solution: remove some of the blood pregenitor cells, store them, give the patient high doses of radiation or chemotherapy to eradicate the cancer, then infuse the blood progenitor cells, which can then produce normal red and white blood cells and platelets in the marrow.


There are two kinds of bone marrow transplants, allogeneic and autologous. An allogeneic transplant uses bone marrow or stem cells from a donor whose tissue closely matches that of the person receiving the transplant. An autologous transplant, the less risky of the two procedures, uses the patient’s own cells, collected from either bone marrow or peripheral blood stem cells, to treat their cancer. Memorial’s new unit will start out performing autologous transplants and in the next few years expand the unit’s services to include the allogeneic transplants.


The unit is the third component of the Leukemia, Lymphoma and Bone Marrow Transplant (BMT) Program, which is also comprised of research and specialty care for cancer patients.


Until now patients had to travel out-of-town or even out-of-state to receive the transplant. “There has been a real commitment on the part of Memorial Healthcare System to invest in this,” says Daren Grosman, MD. “One of the things that will be unique about the program is that our bone marrow transplants will be outpatient procedures. Now that the supportive care, antibiotics and anti-nausea medications have gotten so refined, we can actually keep most patients at home through their transplants.”


“This is actually a standard of care for certain cancers of the blood and lymph nodes,” says Dr. Feinstein. “This has been my passion and my professional life for years."

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