Children who had seemed doomed to die within weeks may have been rescued by injections of stem cells originally extracted from healthy bone marrow donors.
The children all had graft-versus-host disease, a condition in which bone marrow transplants aimed at treating diseases such as leukaemia end up attacking the child instead. Between 30 and 60 per cent of children receiving such transplants develop the condition. While the majority of cases are mild and can be resolved with immunosuppressive drugs, a minority of patients do not respond to treatment and die within three months from liver failure, diarrhoea and bleeding in…
