Genzyme in the UK
Our Treatment Areas
Bone Marrow Transplantation
What is bone marrow transplantation?
This involves taking stem cells (the cells in bone marrow that can grow into certain types of blood cells) and then injecting them into the bloodstream of patients needing stem cell transplantation for their medical condition so the injected stem cells multiply and grow into healthy blood cells.
Sometimes, it’s possible to take a patient’s own bone marrow stem cells, remove any diseased cells, and then put the healthy ones back into the bloodstream, which is known as an ‘autologous’ bone marrow transplantation. This is a successful treatment for some types of blood cancer.
How is Genzyme helping patients receiving bone marrow transplantation?
Previously, autologous transplantation could not be carried out in approximately 20% of patients because they could not release enough cells in their blood to collect for the transplant procedure. And for some of these patients, a bone marrow transplant may have been their only hope of remission or cure.
Now, Genzyme has developed and tested a drug that can mobilise stem cells from the bone marrow into the bloodstream so that there is a greater chance that there are enough of them in the blood stream for collection and subsequent autologous transplantation. This means that some patients with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and multiple myeloma, who previously were not able to undergo this procedure, may now benefit from treatment.
Sources: NHS Health A–Z website; Genzyme press release
Date of preparation: January 2011
