What cancers are treated with bone marrow or stem cell transplants?
Transplants are currently being used primarily to treat Hodgkin’s and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, leukemia and some breast cancers. They may also prove effective with certain lung and ovarian cancers. What are the types of transplants? Four types of bone marrow transplants are used to treat cancer patients: • autologous (the patient’s own marrow or stem cells); • syngeneic (from an identical twin); • matched allogeneic (from a family member or unrelated (genetically-similar individual) with the same tissue or HLA type; and • partially mismatched allogeneic transplant from a family member with only a partial matching of HLA typing, which is the so-called haplo-identical donor. What is the difference between bone marrow and stem cell transplants? Stem cell transplantation usually refers to cases of transplantation in which the stem cells are collected from the peripheral blood by apheresis. When stem cells are collected by harvesting them from the bone marrow, it is called bone marrow transp
