Children in Michigan will soon have another resource to treat blood disorders.

The new resource will be through gene therapy, as explained by Dr. Sureyya Savasan, the medical director of the transplant and cell therapy at Children’s Hospital of Michigan.

“Your own cells are taken out of your body and engineered and returned back to the body,” Savasan said. “So anybody can have a gene therapy, right? I mean, obviously, when I say anybody, there are certain criteria you follow from a medical perspective, but it’s not like the bone marrow transplant. Because in that, you have to have a matching donor. That’s huge.”

Savasan calls this life-changing for patients who could sometimes wait for years to find a bone marrow donor. With this special treatment over time, they could even become symptom-free as they battle thalassemia and sickle cell.

Children’s Hospital of Michigan announced this week the first patient to receive this new treatment is a teen boy at its hospital in Detroit.