Baby Elianna Saved From a Lifelong Disease Before She’s Even Born.
After being diagnosed with a blood disorder, Alpha-thalassemia-major, this baby had a high chance of either being stillborn or not surviving long after birth. The ultrasound left the mother, Nichelle Obar, heartbroken. But defying all odds, Elianna became the first baby to receive a stem cell transplant, the first of its kind. Four months later, Elianna was born a healthy baby girl with promising signs of growing to live a normal life.
To have alpha thalassemia major means your blood doesn’t produce a necessary protein, hemoglobin, that transports oxygen by binding to it. Without the proper supply of oxygen, fetuses can be born with severe swelling, anemia, enlarged organs and become host to other life-threatening problems.
As is common practice, fetuses with alpha thalassemia major are treated with blood transfusions during the second semester of pregnancy. If the baby is delivered fine, these transfusions are carried out for the rest of their lives. Either this or a bone marrow transplant is performed in early childhood. But, this poses a problem most of the time since patient-donor matches are incompatible and the procedure is dangerous.
In UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital, doctors started treating Elianna with standard in-utero blood transfusions but also with something else; blood stem cells from her mother’s bone marrow. Dr. Tippi MacKenzie, who was the doctor in charge of Elianna’s treatment, explains during a video describing the procedure that they hoped the blood stem cells would travel to the fetus’s bone marrow and start producing healthy red blood cells, capable of carrying oxygen.
The doctors now claim that babies diagnosed with alpha thalassemia major can be treated using stem cell transfusion, but waiting until after the baby is born comes with further complications.
Performing the procedure after birth puts the baby at risk of toxicities added to the body to make room in the bone, “and that can cause disease on its own,” said Dr. MacKenzie. Since a fetus receives all its necessities from its mother’s blood, it is very tolerant to it rather than after birth. Without worrying about tissue rejection or the fetus’s immune system acting up, doctors can safely perform the transplant.
Although Elianna was born three weeks before she was due and was slightly underweight, she shows promising signs of being a healthy baby. Only after a specific period of time will the doctors actually be able to tell if she was cured of the blood disorder for good.
If this treatment proves successful, this could be a turning point in the world of medicine, where unborn babies can be treated for any disease they carry without losing their lives or having to suffer the consequences later in life.
