Soon, patients in and around the steel city who need a bone marrow transplant would not need to travel to big cities for the facility. Tata Main Hospital, run by Tata Steel, is expected to perform its first bone marrow transplant in November this year.

A panel of doctors — Tata Steel general manager (medical services) Dr Rajan Chaudhry, director of Meherbai Tata Memorial Hospital Dr Sujata Mitra and her colleague and head of the department of medical oncology Dr Anil Kumar Dhar — told the media on Wednesday that facilities for bone marrow transplant had been developed at a centre at Tata Main Hospital.

The panel said Meherbai Tata Memorial Hospital, at Northern Town, Bistupur, would soon serve as a level I cancer treatment centre and become the apex centre for research and complex treatment facility for cancer in the region. Tata Main Hospital, Bistupur, will collaborate with Meherbai Tata Memorial Hospital for the initiative.

“Meherbai Tata Memorial Hospital has already started offering comprehensive cancer care facilities in Jamshedpur. While the facilities at Tata Main Hospital would be used for surgical oncology, Meherbai Tata Memorial Hospital would offer radiation oncology as a collaborative effort. Usually, patients in need of bone marrow transplant have to travel to other cities. If everything goes right, we will perform the first transplant here in November,” said Dr Chaudhry.

A bone marrow transplant is a medical procedure performed to replace a patient’s existing bone marrow damaged or destroyed by disease, infection or chemotherapy. The procedure involves transplanting blood stem cells into the patient, which travel to the bone marrow to produce new blood cells and push new marrow growth. Bone marrow transplants have been used to treat patients diagnosed with leukaemia, aplastic anaemia, lymphomas such as Hodgkin’s disease, multiple myeloma, immune deficiency disorders and breast and ovarian cancer.

The upcoming comprehensive cancer centre will also have hi tech machines like linear accelerator for radio therapy, positron emission tomography (PET) scan machine for early detection of cancer.

Dr Dhar explained stem cell collection procedure with the help of a presentation. “The collection of stem cells is a non-surgical procedure. The process is known as apheresis where blood from a donor is collected and the components are separated. Once stem cells are retrieved, the rest of the blood that contains platelets, red blood cells and white blood cells are safely returned to the donor,” said Dr Dhar, who worked before as head of department of medical oncology at Army Research and Referral Hospital in New Delhi.