Paris – A medical team from France managed to cure a baby with an aggressive vascular tumor, while he was still in his mother’s womb, thanks to a medication administered to the mother orally, a successful pioneering treatment for this type of ailment and made public this Monday.
At the beginning of the eighth month of pregnancy, doctors, thanks to an ultrasound, diagnosed that the fetus had Kasabach-Merritt syndrome.a particularly aggressive type of tumor that develops in the neck and can cause prenatal death due to the risk of respiratory compression.
It was then that, at the end of last year, the reference center for superficial vascular anomalies of the Civil Hospices of Lyon, a specialist in these rare pathologies, proposed that a treatment be carried out before birth by administering to the mother an oral medication capable of crossing the placenta and thus reaching the fetus.
It was Sirolimus, an antiangiogenic agent that limits the proliferation of blood vessels, which allowed the growth of the tumor to be stopped. It was the first time that such a therapy was used to treat a vascular tumor of this type, according to the medical team.
Issa was born by cesarean section at the Hautepierre maternity hospital, in Strasbourg, on November 14, 2025.
The size of the tumor had decreased and the baby did not need to be intubated to breathe, although his platelet level was quite low, requiring a platelet transfusion. Issa was discharged from the hospital a month after his birth.
“It is an exceptional treatment that has allowed us to save this child, with a malformation that has been stabilized”celebrated Dr. Alexandra Spiegel-Bouhadid, hematologist at the pediatric service of the GHR Mulhouse Sud-Alsace, who has followed Issa since her birth.
Chris Minella, a leading doctor at the Pluridisciplinary Center for Prenatal Diagnosis of the University Hospitals of Strasbourg, has been another of the doctors who has followed the little one from the beginning.
Today, at 3 months old, Issa has a mass in the lower part of his face, but he is a smiling and awake baby, according to his mother, Viviane, 34 years old.