5-Year-Old Leukemia Patient Dies From Treatment at Chinese Hospital, Misdiagnosed

The young boy may have been used as a guinea pig for a clinical treatment and his parents weren't informed

Fan Yuzhe was only five years old when he received medical treatment for leukemia at Beijing's Boren Hospital in 2018. Courtesy of the Yuzhe family/The Epoch Times

A young boy who had contracted leukemia received a bone marrow transplant and T-Cell-based immunotherapy at Beijing’s Boren Hospital last year. A few months later, he suffered from immune rejection and multiple organ failure, and had to go to another hospital for a lung transplant operation. He died in May this year as a result of multiple organ failure.

When the boy’s mother went through his treatment records, she found that the doctors at Boren Hospital had made contradictory diagnoses and treatment recommendations for him. The hospital had used the child as a guinea pig for T-Cell-based immunotherapy without informing the parents. Presently these therapies are not approved for clinical treatment in China.

The Treatments

Five-year-old Fan Yuzhe from eastern China’s Jiangsu Province was diagnosed with leukemia when he was a toddler in 2015. On recommendation from a doctor in Shanghai, his parents took him to Boren Hospital, where he received CAR T-Cell Therapy first and a bone marrow transplant thereafter. Yuzhe’s father was the bone marrow donor. The transplant operation was performed in August 2017 and was considered successful.