Tuesday Morning Medical Update: Using Stem Cells to Treat Lymphoma

The University of Kansas Health System is treating a total of 50 COVID patients today, up from 41 yesterday. Other significant numbers: 31 with the active virus today, 26 yesterday 8 in ICU, 5 yesterday 3 on ventilators, 3 yesterday 19 hospitalized but out of acute infection phase, 15 yesterday Key points from today’s guests: Vince Seiwart, bone marrow transplant patient When I was first diagnosed it was a shock, but the Health System got me in so quick that didn't have a lot of time to dwell on it. So that helped a lot. When I was diagnosed, I absolutely had no symptoms. I was pretty active and still working full time. During a yearly physical I had just kind of a lump on one side and it turned out to be my spleen was enlarged. And by finding that when we did I imagine it saved my life. Other than my son being a bone marrow donor, did not know much about Car T therapy. Dr. Nausheen Ahmed, hematology and medical oncology, The University of Kansas Health System Car T cell therapy has literally revolutionized care in lymphoma. It's a paradigm shift that's been FDA approved in 2017. And the last six years we've been able to offer this to many of our patients who need it. It uses the body's own immune system because we believe that now that lymphoma or any other blood cancers grew because those cancer cells have blinded your immune system and your immune system cannot see them and fight them. So we use your body's immune system, your soldiers, your T cells that are in your blood, take them out genetically modify those cells and make them now a more able to see the cancer and then infuse those back and then they go and they work like Pac Man to go and destroy the cancer cells. So an autologous stem cell transplant is just a fancy term where we use stem cells from the patient's own body so we don't need a donor for that and that's what wins. That's what we did for Vince. We know that that chemotherapy can have can affect your stem cells and destroy your stem cells. So we take some healthy stem cells from before from the patient's body, and store them in a freezer. And then once we're done with the chemo, we infuse those cells back and that way it helps to get the body back strong again and get you to recover from the transplant. It's kind of like when you do lawn care and you want to get rid of weed in the back of the grass, you want to save some seeds of the good grass so that later on once everything's gone, then you can just plant the good grass back and it's your own grass and it'll just grow back again. We have a handful of transplant programs across the nation that have a dedicated survivorship program. We've noticed that there are many things that we can help with like bone health, cardiovascular health, infection risk, other things that may be different from the general population and they may need more specialized or individualized care plans. We want people to get back to their normal routine, get back to what life is for them. And Vince has been very active even before the transplant. Wednesday, September 14 at 8:00 a.m. is the next Open Mics with Dr. Stites. Violence is now one of the leading causes of death among young people. But there’s an effort to do something about that, and keep young victims of violence from returning to the emergency department. You’ll meet the group that’s putting a new program into place and find out how it works.