A BMT used to mean the patient’s bone marrow had to be completely destroyed by an intensive regimen of high-dose chemotherapy and whole-body radiation prior to the actual transplant in order to kill all cancer cells in the patient. This process, called myeloablation, can be debilitating to the patient. Today in many cases, HCT with RIC (reduced-intensity conditioning), sometimes called a mini-allogeneic transplant, is a viable therapeutic option. In this type of protocol, the patient receives a normal-dose chemotherapy regimen and a lower dose of whole-body radiation prior to the transplant.

This approach works because the newly-transplanted, or “engrafted,” stem cells actually motivate an immune response to kill cancer cells. This important finding is known as the graft-versus-tumor effect, and has made HCT possible in patients who may have not been able to withstand full myeloablative transplants such as elderly patients or patients with other disease complications.

City of Hope physicians are leaders in performing all of these types of transplants, continually refining and perfecting therapeutic techniques based on developing research.