• Question: What is Hematopoietic stem cell transplantation?

    Asked by tabbyboo to Emma, James, Jayne, Kara, Sharon on 15 Mar 2011 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Sharon Sneddon

      Sharon Sneddon answered on 13 Mar 2011:

      Hematopoietic stem cell transplants are used to treat patients with cancers and other disorders of the blood and immune systems.

      You may have heard of a bone marrow transplant to help treat people with leukaemia, well that is a form of haematopoetic stem cell transplant, and its really sucessful.

      The stem cells that form blood and immune cells are known as hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs). They are ultimately responsible for the constant renewal of blood—the production of billions of new blood cells each day. A hematopoietic stem cell is a cell isolated from the blood or bone marrow that can remake itself, and turn into variety of different types of blood cells,

      Doctors will harvest HSC’s from a donor, and specialist scientists take them to the lab to prepare them for transplant into the patient. Which will be done similar to a blood transfusion. Once transfused, the cells will hopefully start to grow and divide into healthy blood cells.
      Does this answer your question?

    • Photo: Emma King

      Emma King answered on 14 Mar 2011:

      Again the others can probably answer this with much more authority than me!
      But hematopoietic means that it’s to do with blood. So an hematopoietic stem cell transplantation means that you are giving somebody blood progenitor cells (the stem cells which make all of your blodo cells – white, red and platelets etc) – with the aim of helping the body to regenerate blood cells that have been lost. Often what people need are more white cells – which help you fight disease – because their cells have been damaged by leukemia or cancer treatment. A bone marrow transplant used to be the way to do this but getting out bone marrow is quite painful for the donor – so now I think they normally collect the stem cells from blood by giving the donor drugs which make the body release some of their stem cells from their bone marrow into the circulatory system.
      Interestingly bone marrow transplants are a ‘stem cell therapy’ – which has already been in use for many years!

    • Photo: James Chan

      James Chan answered on 15 Mar 2011:

      this is where you extract a type of stem cell, called haematopoietic stem cell, from the blood or bone marrow of a healthy person and inject (transplant) it into another person. The recipient is typically people with diseases of the blood or bone marrow, often cancer – you may have heard of leukaemia. Haematopoietic stem cells are stem cells that are able to turn into all the different cells that make up your blood. So the idea is to replace the diseased blood with healthy blood – the stem cells would make new blood in the recipient. But there are many problems with this because many of these patients are already very sick and their bodies might recognise that the new blood is not their own and therefore reject it, and make the patients even sicker.

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