The bone marrow in therapy
It can be therapeutically very valuable to transplant certain blood cells, i.e. to give them to a human being. These blood cells are stem cells that have the ability to develop into numerous different blood cells. Such a transplant can be performed with cells from peripheral blood, i.e. similar to a blood donation (peripheral stem cell transplantation) or with cells from bone marrow.
The former is becoming more and more popular compared to bone marrow donation. In addition, a distinction is made as to whether a patient’s own cells are removed and re-administered (autologous stem cell transplantation) or whether cells are removed from a compatible donor and then administered to the recipient (allogeneic stem cell transplantation). Essential in such a procedure is the compatibility of donor and recipient with regard to certain tissue characteristics, the so-called HLA molecules.
Only if the donor and recipient are as compatible as possible, there is a good chance that the recipient’s body will not reject the donor’s cells. Siblings are most likely to be compatible, and today there are also extensive databases in which the HLA characteristics of numerous voluntary donors are stored. Stem cell transplantation can be used therapeutically for some forms of leukemia, Hodgkin’s lymphoma and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, immune defects, hematological diseases such as thalassemia and others.
