The Aplastic Anaemia Trust turns 40 this year, and we have made a special treat for you to celebrate. We invited Professor Ted Gordon Smith to Kings Hospital to meet with Dr Austin Kulasekararaj and discuss treatment for aplastic anaemia and how it has improved.

In this fourth video, Prof Gordon Smith asks Dr Austin about what transplants are like for aplastic anaemia patients now, and learns about one huge advance since his day.

Video transcript

Prof Ted: One of the things that interests me a lot is the expansion of the possible donors for patients in transplantation, which I'd like to hear from you about how that’s been going on, that’s been a big advance. 

Dr Austin: So I think that is, so nowadays we say everyone has a donor, there isn’t anyone who doesn’t have a donor. I think that is because of the expanding use of haploidentical (ie half-match donors) coming from parents, children, siblings, and the success rate with half matched donors has been extremely good - more or less matching unrelated donor success - so that, I think definitely is a good thing. 

Prof Ted: That is fascinating and is absolutely astonishing to me, thinking back as to the importance of tissue matching in the early days and how we were desperate to do it absolutely perfectly. And now you guarantee a donor! Because, if it’s parents and children who are there - we’ve all got parents, and many of us have got children! So that’s one huge advance.