Katherine's stem cell transplant Allogeneic stem cell transplant Tuesday, October 29, 2013. By: Stephen Sinfield … Continue reading →

Your stem cells may be collected after you have had a course of chemotherapy, because some of the stem cells move out of the bone marrow and into the blood at this time. You often need to have cells collected for 2, or sometimes 3, days in a row to get enough. Collecting the stem cells takes 3 or 4 hours each time. You lie down on a couch. A drip is put into each of your arms and attached to a machine. Your blood passes out of one drip, through the machine and back into your body through the other drip. The machine filters the stem cells out of your blood. If you don't have enough stem cells, you may need to have injections of a type of drug called G-CSF. If stem cells are being collected from a donor, your donor will need to have G-CSF. It makes stem cells spill out from the bone marrow and into the blood. You have the injections for up to 10 days. You have blood tests to check the level of stem cells in your bloodstream. When there are enough, your stem cells are collected. The stem cells are frozen until … Continue reading →

The bone marrow and stem cell transplant program at the Siteman Cancer Center is one of the largest in the world, completing about 400 transplants each year and more than 5,000 since 1982. The program has performed unrelated donor transplants since 1992. Our physicians use the latest clinical techniques and resources to collect stem cells or peripheral blood for allogeneic transplants, in which transplanted cells come from siblings and unrelated donors. By manipulating stem cell grafts, they also are working to reduce tumor contamination and bolster immunity. Whenever it is appropriate, they recommend that patients participate inclinical trials, research studies that test whether new ways to prevent, diagnose and treat cancer are safe and effective. At any given time, Siteman offers more than 40 therapeutic clinical trials for patients with leukemia, lymphoma, multiple myeloma and related disorders, including studies that incorporate transplant. Our large patient population allows us to offer single-institution studies and provides us with access to a wide range of tissue samples for future study. In recent years, Siteman physicians have conducted clinical studies that led to the approval of the drug plerixafor to mobilize, or harvest, stem cells for transplant in patients with non-Hodgkin lymphoma and multiple … Continue reading →

About stem cell transplants Stem cell transplant is a treatment to try to cure some types of leukaemia, lymphoma and other conditions affecting the bone marrow, such as myeloma. You have very high doses of chemotherapy, sometimes with whole body radiotherapy. This has a good chance of killing the cancer cells but also kills the stem cells in the bone marrow. We need stem cells in order to make red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets. So after the high dose treatment you have stem cells into your vein through a drip. You may have your own stem cells or some from a donor. You have injections of growth factors before, and sometimes after, the stem cell transplant. Growth factors are natural proteins that make the bone marrow produce blood cells. You have them as small injections under the skin for between 5 and 10 days. Sometimes you may have low doses of a chemotherapy drug too. The chemotherapy and growth factor injections help your bone marrow to make lots of stem cells. These stem cells then spill out of the bone marrow into the bloodstream, where they can be collected. Collecting the stem cells takes 3 or 4 … Continue reading →

Hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) is the transplantation of multipotent hematopoietic stem cells, usually derived from bone marrow, peripheral blood, or umbilical cord blood. It is a medical procedure in the fields of hematology and oncology, most often performed for patients with certain cancers of the blood or bone marrow, such as multiple myeloma or leukemia. In these cases, the recipient's immune system is usually destroyed with radiation or chemotherapy before the transplantation. Infection and graft-versus-host disease is a major complication of allogenic HSCT. Hematopoietic stem cell transplantation remains a dangerous procedure with many possible complications; it is reserved for patients with life-threatening diseases. As the survival of the procedure increases, its use has expanded beyond cancer, such as autoimmune diseases.[1][2] Many recipients of HSCTs are multiple myeloma[3] or leukemia patients[4] who would not benefit from prolonged treatment with, or are already resistant to, chemotherapy. Candidates for HSCTs include pediatric cases where the patient has an inborn defect such as severe combined immunodeficiency or congenital neutropenia with defective stem cells, and also children or adults with aplastic anemia[5] who have lost their stem cells after birth. Other conditions[6] treated with stem cell transplants include sickle-cell disease, myelodysplastic syndrome, neuroblastoma, lymphoma, … Continue reading →