Haematopoietic stem cell transplantation in Hong Kong

The first case of haematopoietic stem cell transplant (HSCT) was performed at the Bone Marrow Transplant Center, Queen Mary Hospital (QMH) in 1990. Since then three more transplant centres have been established: Prince of Wales Hospital (1991) mainly in paediatric transplant, Queen Elizabeth Hospital (1995) and Tuen Mun Hospital (2006) in adult autologous transplant. Up to the end of 2008, a little over 2000 transplants have been performed in Hong Kong, and QMH takes up about 85% of the total number of cases. A unified HSCT registry in Hong Kong is desirable and is yet to be established. At QMH, by the end of 2008, a total of 1708 transplant procedures have been performed with 83% (1417) being first-time transplants and the rest (291, 17%) are repeat transplants mostly for relapsed patients. The numbers of male and female patients are 955 and 753, respectively. The median age is 35.4 years (range, 3 months to 67 years) with 85.8% of the transplants performed in adults (> 18 years). The type of donor includes 34% autologous, 1% syngeneic, 38% related allogeneic and 27% unrelated allogeneic. The top five indications of the first-time transplants are acute myeloid leukaemia (25.8%), chronic myeloid leukaemia (15.9%), lymphoma (14.6%), acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (14.5%), and myeloma (8.6%). With the development of peripheral blood stem cell collection, in recent years it is performed in 50% of the allogeneic and 80% of the autologous cases. Bone marrow harvest in autologous cases is only for patients who fail peripheral blood stem cell mobilisation. Transplant outcomes are reported to the Center for International Blood and Marrow Transplant Research and long-term survivals are in general comparable to international standard.