Bone Marrow Transplant

Avinash Cancer Clinic    20-Jul-2022
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Bone Marrow Transplant

Bone Marrow transplant is a special procedure used to treat a variety of disorders.

 
It is of two types
 
  1. Autologous stem cell transplant: When the patients stem cells are used for himself. Here the patient’s stem cells are harvested and stored. Chemotherapy is given and then stem cells are reinfused.
  2. Allogenic Stem cell transplant: When another person’s stem cells are used. The person giving his stem cells is called a donor.
 
Donors can be
 
  1. Matched related transplant: These are family members having a 6/6 or 10/10 HLA match with the patient
  2. Matched unrelated transplant: These donors are unrelated people who share a 10/10 HLA match with the recipient
  3. Haploidentical Transplant: These donors are family members without a complete match having more than 5/10 match with the patient.
 
Steps of Transplant:
 
  1. Hickman insertion: A special line is inserted to facilitate the process of giving medications and infusing blood and stem cells.
  2. Conditioning regimen: Chemotherapy is given via injections before the transplant to the patient. The purpose is to destroy the diseased bone marrow.
  3. Stem Cell Transfusion: The stem cells collected from the donor are transfused via the Hickman line
  4. GvHD prophylaxis: These are medicines given to prevent the reactions of transplant
 
Engraftment:
 
This is when the patient WBC and platelet starts increasing. This is the earliest sign of recovery and a sign of success of transplant.
 
 
Source of stem cells:
 
  1. Peripheral blood stem cells: Here given an injection for 5 days to mobilize the stem cells in the blood. The donor is then connected to apheresis machine and stem cells are collected from the donor
  2. Bone Marrow stem cells: Here the donors is sedated and stem cells are connected directly from the bone marrow
  3. Cord blood stem cells: Here the stored cord blood cells collected at the time of birth of baby are used for the transplant.