A REVOLUTION IN PATIENT CARE

FOR BLOOD CANCERS & DISEASES

Baptist Health physicians carefully consider our patients’ conditions and specific needs to provide the most appropriate personalized treatment plan. Patient access combined with the latest research provide our patients with best-in-care solutions. This was true for Daymara Cano, a young mother with leukemia whose life was saved by a blood and marrow transplant.

Like most Saturday mornings for Ms Cano, June 5 , 2020 began with plans to have breakfast with her husband and their two young children before getting on with the weekend’s busy activities But when she collapsed trying to get out of bed, she knew something was seriously wrong . Her husband, Ronald, rushed her to the Baptist Health Baptist Hospital Emergency Department. After a variety of tests, Ms . Cano got news she never expected : she had acute myeloid leukemia (AML), a type of blood cancer

There would be no attending her son Adrian’s baseball tournament in Orlando in July, no painting with her daughter, Victoria. Instead, Ms . Cano was immediately admitted to the hospital to begin treatment for her life-threatening disease. AML can be aggressive, and within hours of arriving at the emergency room, Ms . Cano felt very ill. Doctors quickly began the chemotherapy regimen designed to put her into remission Fortunately, the chemo was effective in inducing a complete remission However, the care team at Baptist Health knew the disease would return without blood and marrow transplantation

Blood and marrow transplants are used to treat a variety of blood cancers as well as other blood diseases such as aplastic anemia and severe combined immune deficiency . What made Ms . Cano’s allogeneic blood marrow transplant successful was the groundbreaking work of Dr . Guenther Koehne , who developed a technique to manipulate donor cells prior to transplant to diminish the often harmful, and sometimes deadly, graft-versus -host disease complication

“As a result of the ability to remove the donor’s T lymphocytes in the laboratory prior to the stem cell transplantation, our patients don’t need to be treated with immunosuppressive drugs posttransplant,” says Dr. Koehne. “This eliminates the need to measure drug levels twice weekly at the least, not to mention that the drugs have side effects of their own.”

More than a year after her AML diagnosis, Ms . Cano experienced another day she will never forget. On October 5, 2021, surrounded by her family, she rang the bell at Baptist Health Miami Cancer Institute, signifying the end of her treatment.