British Indian boy travels to US for revolutionary treatment
11 March 2018 11:30 PM IST
London: A seven-year-old Indian-origin boy who suffers from cerebral palsy left with his family for the US on Sunday for a revolutionary treatment that has the potential to improve the quality of his life and give hope to others with neurological disorders.
Jay Shetty suffers from a debilitating form of cerebral palsy and autism since he was a baby, which means he cannot walk, talk or sit up unaided.
He is now set to undergo a pioneering clinical trial at Duke University Medical Centre in North Carolina, which relies on the infusion of his younger brother's umbilical cord blood frozen at birth.
After a lot of research on stem cells, we had decided before I got pregnant with Kairav, our younger son, that we would save our child's cord blood. Then towards the end of the pregnancy in 2015, I got in touch with Duke University and they were planning on doing a sibling cord blood therapy trial, said Jay's mother Shilpa.
She and husband Raj had the umbilical cord blood of their younger child frozen and stored by UK-based blood bank Cells4Life. Umbilical cord blood is rich in a kind of stem cell that can, in theory, help heal most parts of the body, either by stimulating growth or by transforming into the required type of mature cell. These can then be put back into the body, even many years later. It relies on a close tissue match for the recipient, to lower the odds of the body rejecting it. When the Shettys contacted Duke University, they were told that Kairav's blood was a match for Jay's raising the prospect of the UK's first such sibling cord blood therapy on Jay.
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