The Children's Bone Marrow and Stem Cell Trust

The Blood and Marrow Transplant Unit at the Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital continues to offer state of the art transplant care for Children of Manchester, the wider North-West region, and beyond. The Unit is now established as Europe’s largest centre for the transplantation of metabolic diseases and, as the move to the new hospital is planned, it is hoped that some new translational protocols, including gene therapy, will be offered in Manchester. As these medical techniques of transplant continue to change and Manchester continues to lead such change, the work of the Children’s Bone Marrow and Stem Cell Trust – now 25 years of such work – helps keep Manchester at the forefront of this field of medicine.

In the last years the Trust has helped build and equip and run:

• A dedicated 7-bed Children’s unit for the use of bone marrow transplant patients
• A dedicated stem cell laboratory, including state-of-the-art stem cell manipulation technologies

In this last year Manchester, as a clinical laboratory facility, has been accredited against the most exacting international standards and is the first such stand-alone Children’s Hospital in the UK to be recognised in this way. The Fund, therefore, is now focused on:>br>
• Planning the transfer of the children to the new Children’s Hospital in Central Manchester. This will ensure that transplant care will take place in a superb purpose-built and modern facility
• Planning the transfer of the Stem Cell Laboratory to this same Central site
• Providing viral financial support to our associated research group. This is particularly focused on transplantation of metabolic and non-malignant disease, which is a growth area. It is hoped that international collaborative gene therapy trials for some of these illnesses will start firstly in Manchester within the next years.

Although rightly established in the NHS, the Fund enables us to provide what is really needed – in the ward, in the laboratory and in the research laboratory – when it is needed rather than when the bureaucracy allows. Thank you for your support in this way.

Dr Rob Wynn
Transplant Director

Registered Charity Number 702817

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