Dr. Mohammad Maher Abdul Hay is optimistic about Carballo’s outlook, noting that Perlmutter Cancer Center is uniquely positioned to treat those who need a comprehensive, integrated approach.
When 44-year-old Allison Carballo was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia in 2016, she was told she had only a 5 percent chance of surviving the next 30 days. It felt to her like time had stopped altogether.
Yet today, Carballo is very much alive—defying those early odds with the help of her care team at NYU Langone Health’s Perlmutter Cancer Center and an extraordinary gift from her 13-year-old daughter, who helped save her life through a first-of-its-kind bone marrow transplant at NYU Langone.
Acute myeloid leukemia is an aggressive blood cancer that progresses rapidly without treatment. For Carballo, who has a very rare KMT2A mutation, the diagnosis came with a grim prognosis.
Her world narrowed to a series of hospital rooms, treatment plans, and difficult conversations. Over time, Carballo endured countless treatments, including two bone marrow transplants. Each procedure was a leap of faith and a new chance at life. But despite everything she had been through, her cancer returned.
Carballo’s options were dwindling. A third transplant is rare and carries increased risk. Many doctors were hesitant. Some had already said no.
Carballo knew the reality: the more transplants a patient has, the more complex each additional procedure becomes. It was difficult not to feel like doors were closing.
Then, one physician opened a new one.
When Mohammad Maher Abdul Hay, MD, director of the Blood and Marrow Transplantation and Cellular Therapy Center and the Clinical Leukemia Program at Perlmutter Cancer Center, learned about Carballo’s case, he reached out instead of turning her away. Within a week, she met with him to discuss how the team at Perlmutter Cancer Center could help her.
“The moment I met Dr. Abdul Hay, I felt that he understood me, and was confident he could help,” said Carballo. “Where others saw limits, he saw possibility.”
According to Carballo, his approach was both confident and calming. He believed there was more that could be done. Under his guidance, Carballo was enrolled in a menin inhibitor clinical trial—a promising, targeted therapy for certain forms of leukemia. She was a strong match for the trial, and the treatment successfully returned her cancer to remission.
Over the next five months, Dr. Abdul Hay and his team worked closely with Carballo, monitoring her health and progress. Then, he raised a question that had once felt impossible to ask: Would she consider a third bone marrow transplant?
For Carballo, the idea of a third transplant came with both hope and fear. She had asked other institutions before and had been turned down. But this time was different. She and Dr. Abdul Hay spoke at length about the risks and benefits. A third transplant would not be easy. It would be the first time the team at NYU Langone attempted a third transplant. But they believed, together, that it might be the best chance for a durable remission.
It was a decision that required extraordinary trust—trust in the science, in the team, and in the institution caring for her.
NYU Langone’s Blood and Marrow Transplantation and Cellular Therapy Center is among the most experienced in the country, with a milestone 1,000th autologous/allogeneic transplant recently completed. The center’s expertise is reflected in its outcomes. Its one-year survival rate, as reported by the Center for International Blood and Marrow Transplant Research, is an outstanding 81.7 percent—leading the tristate area.
Finding a donor so far into Carballo’s cancer journey posed another challenge. But the answer came from someone she had been fighting for all along: her 13-year-old daughter. Testing revealed that Carballo’s daughter was a haploidentical donor, or half-match. At many centers, such partial matches would have once been considered less than ideal. But experts at NYU Langone are highly experienced in haploidentical transplants, a specialized type of blood and marrow transplant that uses healthy cells from a half-matched donor.
In a haploidentical transplant, the donor shares half of the patient’s human leukocyte antigen markers—proteins on cells that help the immune system distinguish between self and nonself. Thanks to advances in transplant medicine and posttransplant care, these half-matched procedures have become a powerful option, expanding the donor pool for patients who might otherwise have no match.
For Carballo, this meant her daughter could not only stand by her side but could also help save her life.
With meticulous preparation and a deeply coordinated team effort, Carballo had her third bone marrow transplant at Perlmutter Cancer Center using donor cells from her daughter.
The procedure was a success.
While transplantation is never a single moment but a long journey of recovery and follow-up, the outcome has been profoundly hopeful. Today, Carballo remains under close monitoring with her care team and is participating in another clinical trial as part of her ongoing care. Her doctors, including Dr. Abdul Hay, are optimistic about her outlook.
“These kinds of procedures require coordination across disciplines, including surgeons, oncologists, nurses, and technicians,” said Dr. Abdul Hay. “We are uniquely positioned at Perlmutter Cancer Center to treat patients like Allison who need a comprehensive and integrated approach.”
At Perlmutter Cancer Center, teams are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in blood and marrow transplantation—through clinical trials, advanced transplant techniques like haploidentical transplants, and a relentless focus on each patient’s individual needs and goals.
About NYU Langone Health
NYU Langone Health is a fully integrated health system that consistently achieves the best patient outcomes through a rigorous focus on quality that has resulted in some of the lowest mortality rates in the nation. Vizient Inc. has ranked NYU Langone No. 1 out of 118 comprehensive academic medical centers across the nation for four years in a row, and U.S. News & World Report recently ranked four of its clinical specialties No. 1 in the nation. NYU Langone offers a comprehensive range of medical services with one high standard of care across seven inpatient locations, its Perlmutter Cancer Center, and more than 320 outpatient locations in the New York area and Florida. The system also includes two tuition-free medical schools, in Manhattan and on Long Island, and a vast research enterprise.
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Phone: 212-404-4131
Ryan.Dziuba@NYULangone.org
