India’s first ‘saviour sibling’ experiment was successfully conducted ny the doctors recently. The Saviour Sibling named Kavya saved her 6-year-old brother suffering from Thalassemia.
150- 200 ml bone marrow was harvested from Kavya in an hour-long procedure and then given to her brother Abhijeet through transfusion.
Kavya suffered low hemoglobin levels but it was corrected with supplements and she also endured some pain in the areas from where the marrow was taken for a few days. Both Kavya and Abhijeet are healthy.
Saviour Sibling’ refers to babies that are created to serve an older sibling as a donor of organs, bone marrow or cells.
Stem cells from the umbilical cord blood or blood of the saviour sibling are used for treatment of serious blood disorders like thalassemia, sickle cell anaemia. They are created with In vitro fertilisation (IVF) so that they can undergo pre-implantation genetic diagnosis to rule out any genetic disorders and also check bone marrow compatibility. Pre-implantation Genetic Testing (PGT) refers to the genetic profiling of embryos. It is used to screen embryos for genetic diseases or chromosomal abnormalities. From each embryo, PGT takes a biopsy of only a few cells and conducts a genetic analysis. This analysis can search to exclude embryos carrying a genetic variant that causes a hereditary disease, and it can search to find embryos that are an Human Leukocyte Antigen (HLA) match to a sibling. HLA is a type of molecule found on the surface of most cells in the body. These play an important part in the body’s immune response to foreign substances. These make up a person’s tissue type, which varies from person to person. HLA typing is important in organ transplantation protocols, as they determine the likelihood of rejection. The world’s first saviour sibling, Adam Nash, was born in 2000 in the USA.
