A toddler with a rare cancer has been saved after she became only the second person in Britain to be given a transplant using frozen stem cells sent all the way from Japan.

Sorrel Mason, aged two, was given just a 30 per cent chance of survival after a search across Europe and America failed to find a suitable tissue donor.

However, doctors eventually discovered a partial match from stem cells harvested from the umbilical cord of a mother in Tokyo.

Sorrel's mother described the bone marrow transplant carried out at Bristol Royal Hospital for Children as a "miracle".

"Sorrel would be dead now if she had been left untreated," said Samantha Mason, from Great Wratting, Suffolk, who runs a garden centre with her husband, Robert.

"She had a form of acute myeloid leukaemia, which is rare in itself. The outlook was very bleak as there was no bone marrow which had even a close resemblance to Sorrel's. The stem cells frozen in Japan were the only match in the world which could have been used."