Bone Marrow Sampling and Transplants

Bone marrow transplants replace diseased marrow with healthy marrow from a compatible host. It can cure several cancers and genetic disorders like thalassemia.

The donor-recipient compatibility or disease diagnosis is confirmed using a biopsy — a diagnostic test for a sample of red bone marrow.

Red bone marrow is typically harvested from the iliac crest of the donor's hip bone.

Before transplanting the healthy marrow, the patient's affected marrow is destroyed by chemotherapy or radiation to avoid eliciting immune responses to donor marrow.

The healthy marrow is then injected into the patient's veins, from where it migrates to the bone marrow cavities for donor stem cells to multiply.

Once the donor cells establish themselves, the recipient's marrow gets replaced with healthy cells.

An incompatibility of transplanted marrow may cause graft-versus-host reactions.

Graft-rejection risks can be substantially minimized by utilizing the stem cells obtained from the umbilical cord at birth, which can be stored in cord blood banks for future transplantation.

Alternatively, the patient's somatic cells can be genetically reprogrammed to induced pluripotent stem cells for transplant.