Haploidentical Bone Marrow Transplant With Post-Transplant Cyclophosphamide for Patients With Severe Aplastic Anemia

Severe aplastic anemia is a rare and serious form of bone marrow failure related to an immune-mediated mechanism that results in severe pancytopenia and high risk for infections and bleeding. Patients with matched sibling donors for transplantation have a 80-90% chance of survival; however, a response rate with just immunosuppression for those patients lacking suitable HLA-matched related siblings is only 60%. With immunosuppression, only 1/3 of patients are cured, 1/3 are dependent on long term immunosuppression, and the other 1/3 relapse or develop a clonal disorder. Recent studies have shown that using a haploidentical donor for transplantation has good response rates and significantly lower rates of acute and chronic GVHD.