What are the types of stem cell transplant and which is used in childhood AML and why?

When children go through transplant, is it an auto or allo transplant? When children acquire a bone marrow transplant for AML, it is always an allogeneic bone marrow transplant. It is not an autologous transplant. So that means that the transplant you are receiving comes from another donor, not from yourself. How does the process to find a match work for an allo transplant? When a child requires a bone marrow transplant, there is a lot of planning that goes into that. It is not something that can be done the next day or the next week. One of the first steps is to look for the appropriate donor. If the child has any siblings, the siblings will be typed. What that means is we look at the genetic makeup of the patient and we look at the genetic makeup of the siblings to see how similar they are. What we do is we do something called HLA matching, where we look and see how similar are their genomes. If you find a sibling who is a complete match or a perfect match, then that is the best donor for them to go to transplant. Each full sibling, so same mother, same father, will have a 25% chance of being a full match. So the more siblings there are, the better the chance of finding a match. But sometimes there is just one and then you get lucky and that person is a full match. If they have a fully matched sibling who is an appropriate donor for them, in other words, that child does not have any medical problems that would preclude them from donating, then that is almost always the donor that they will go with. If there are no matched siblings, then the donor search has to broaden. At that point, typing will be done for parents, for other slightly more distant relatives, if necessary, and then also what is called an unrelated donor search, which is where you look at the registries of strangers who have offered to become donors for stem cell transplants who are in this registry. They will look and see if any of those strangers are a match for the child. If so, if they find a fully or almost fully matched donor, then that might be the donor they choose. An unrelated donor search will also include looking at the registries of umbilical cord units that have been banked from babies who could be fully matched to the recipient.