Happy aplastic anaemia awareness day! The Aplastic Anaemia Trust turns 40 this year, and we have made a special treat for you to celebrate. We invited Professor Ted Gordon Smith to Kings Hospital to meet with Dr Austin Kulasekararaj and discuss treatment for aplastic anaemia and how it has improved.

In this first video, Professor Gordon Smith talks about how clinicians first started using transplant for patients with aplastic anaemia, in the mid 1970s:

Video transcript

Dr Austin: Good to see you Professor Gordon Smith – You're a legend in the area of aplastic anaemia! 

Prof Ted:  Lovely of you to say so, Austin. In fact, it fell into my lap to become interested in aplastic anaemia when I first went to the Hammersmith hospital.

Dr Austin: Can you tell us a bit more about it? I’m always fascinated by the history of how people get into particular areas and specialisations.  

Prof Ted: Well when I went to the Hammersmith there was almost nothing known about aplastic anaemia but Dr Mitch Lewis, who was the senior person there, was interested in patients with pancytopenia. That’s, as you know, anaemia, a lack of white cells and platelets, of which there are a whole host of causes. So our first job was to try and sort out what we now call aplastic anaemia from other conditions like Myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) and so on. And this was a question of cataloguing patients and collecting data on them.  

We were greatly helped at that time because the only possible treatment for such patients who didn’t have leukaemia but had pancytopenia was to use testosterone-like drugs – anabolic steroids -  and those came from a pharmaceutical firm called Syntex, which was present in Maidenhead. They had an anabolic steroid that had less of the effects of testosterone but built up muscles and it was known from some work in America that these might help with anaemia. So we were able to publish one or two papers about: first of all what aplastic anaemia was, that was Mitch Lewis’ main thing, and secondly, was there any advantage of using anabolic steroids? And there was some advantage, indeed.  

In 1973 we, from The Hammersmith, went over with our results to meet the people from  Seattle in New York to discuss the treatment of aplastic anaemia and was this new startling treatment of transplantation better than oxymetholone? 

We met up with some of the people who had been there in Chicago with Bruce Camitta, who was a very enthusiastic trialist for these things and he set up the first trials of “was anabolic steroids (and support of course, blood transfusions and so on), better or as good as transplantation, for people who had a donor?” 

And of course the paper then came out in 75, 76 or something which showed clearly that transplantation had big advantages  over anabolic steroids or oxymetholone, providing you had a donor.  

And that was the beginning of it! And then we came back to Hammersmith and started the transplant programme.