WHAT IS BONE MARROW TRANSPLANT?

Bone marrow transplant-treatment procedure

Bone marrow transplant is a treatment procedure, which is used to replace the damaged or destroyed blood cells with new healthy blood stem cells in the body. So, this bone marrow transplant is also called as stem cell transplant. BMT is used to treat some cancers like leukemia, multiple myeloma, some types of lymphoma and blood related disorders such as thalassemia and anemia.

Bone Marrow is a soft and spongy tissue part of a bone.This bone marrow contains hematopoietic stem cells, which can turn into different types of blood cells.

Why is bone marrow transplant required?

Stem Cell Transplant or Bone Marrow Transplant is mainly used to achieve three tasks

A high dosage of chemotherapy or radiation treatment is used to destroy cancer cells. during this process, healthy blood cells also damaged due to this high radiation. 

So after cancer therapy the bone marrow transplant is used to replace the damaged cells with new blood cells.

During chemotherapy procedure apart from cancer cells some healthy blood cells also damages with stem cell transplant doctors replace these damaged cells with new stem cells.

Give new stem cells, which can help destroy cancer cells directly.

What are different types of bone marrow transplants?

Three types of bone marrow transplantation procedures are available

• Autologous transplant – here blood stem cells are collected from the patient, frozen and then stored. Usually, this is a pre-chemotherapy process. Based on patient’s condition doctor suggests the perfect time slot to collect these cells from a patient’s body. After chemotherapy or any other radiation processes, the stored cells are gives back to the patient’s body. This process is called rescue transplant.

One can preserved his/her stem cells in lab for days, months or even years too. Doctors will store them until the patient need those cells for their transplantation.

• Allogeneic transplant– In this case doctors collect stem cells or blood cells from a donor. The donor can be a family member or someone else who doesn’t have any relation to the patient. But this is important to find someone whose bone marrow matches to patient’s marrow.

• Umbilical cord blood transplant – This is also similar to allogeneic transplant, but in this case, these stem cells or bone marrow is collected from a newly born baby. In this process stem cells are collected from newly born baby’s umbilical cord right after birth. Then stem cells are frozen and stored until they are required for a transplantation.

After chemotherapy or radiation, these stem cells are given back to the patient’s bloodstream with a central venous catheter tube. The process is quite similar to blood transfusion, injected blood cells travel from blood to bone marrow. Surgery might not be compulsory for this process.