FARGO — Sanford Health in Fargo has reached a milestone in its bone marrow transplant program after just over three years. The team at Sanford performed their 100th bone marrow transplant on Thursday, Oct. 31, at Sanford Broadway Hospital.
Dr. Seth Maliske, a hematologist and medical director of the program, performed Sanford’s first bone marrow transplant on Oct. 20, 2021.
“It’s important for us here at Sanford, but I just think it's exciting for the patients to know that they have this opportunity and that we're giving it to them,” he said. Maliske said bone marrow transplants are most often used when treating blood cancers including leukemia, lymphoma and multiple myeloma. Years ago, Sanford identified a gap in such care when it saw patients traveling 8 to 10 hours round-trip to Minneapolis or Rochester, Minnesota, for a bone marrow transplant.
LaVonne Jacobson, 72, of Fargo, was one of those patients. Diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 2015, Jacobson had an autologous bone marrow transplant at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester months later. Maliske said that kind of transplant is more like a stem cell “rescue,” because the patient gets their own bone marrow back rather than receiving it from someone else.
Jacobson had to rent a home in Rochester for nearly two months, and a family member had to be with her all the time. She was tolerating treatments well until last year, she said, when she was diagnosed with a second blood cancer called myelodysplastic syndrome, .