What are the differences between allogeneic and autologous BMTs?

What are the differences between allogeneic and autologous bone marrow transplants?

What type of bone marrow transplant do MDS patients receive?

Bone marrow transplant when you use a patient's own stem cells for a BMT. And these can be done in diseases where stem cells are not affected by the cancer. For example, it can be used in blood cancers such as multiple myeloma or lymphoma. However, if patients have myelodysplastic syndrome or acute leukemias, their stem cells are affected by these cancers and therefore they cannot be used for transplant procedure as it wouldn't work. In such situations, we perform allogeneic transplantation, meaning we collect stem cells from healthy donors that are tissue matched to the patients, and then we infuse stem cells to replace the bone marrow of unhealthy stem cells in patients with healthy donor cells.

The donor needs to be tissue matched to patients as well in most of the cases. In most recent years, we are also doing a couple identical transplant which we use half match donor tissue typewise as a family member or mismatch unrelated donors can be used as well for transplant procedure.