How does stem cell research help cancer

They are sometimes called stem cell rescue, or bone marrow rescue, or intensive treatment. This transplant uses your own stem cells to replace blood cells destroyed by high doses of chemotherapy and other treatments. The side effects of a stem cell or bone marrow transplant include a risk of infection and bleeding and sickness and diarrhoea.

There are lots of organisations, support groups and helpful books to help you cope with a transplant and its side effects. Read our information about coronavirus and cancer. About Cancer generously supported by Dangoor Education since Questions about cancer? For certain types of leukemia, lymphoma, and multiple myeloma, a stem cell transplant can be an important part of treatment. There are different kinds of stem cell transplants. They all use very high doses of chemo sometimes along with radiation to kill cancer cells.

But the high doses can also kill all the stem cells a person has and can cause the bone marrow to completely stop making blood cells for a period of time. In other words, all of a person's original stem cells are destroyed on purpose. But since our bodies need blood cells to function, this is where stem cell transplants come in. So, transplanting the healthy cells lets doctors use much higher doses of chemo to try to kill all of the cancer cells, and the transplanted stem cells can grow into healthy, mature blood cells that work normally and reproduce cells that are free of cancer.

There's another way a stem cell transplant can work, if it's a transplant that uses stem cells from another person not the cancer patient. In these cases, the transplant can help treat certain types of cancer in a way other than just replacing stem cells. Donated cells can often find and kill cancer cells better than the immune cells of the person who had the cancer ever could.

The "graft" is the donated cells. The effect means that certain kinds of transplants actually help kill off the cancer cells, along with rescuing bone marrow and allowing normal blood cells to develop from the stem cells. Transplant has been used to cure thousands of people with otherwise deadly cancers.

Still, there are possible risks and complications that can threaten life, too. People have died from complications of stem cell transplant.

The expected risks and benefits must be weighed carefully before transplant. Your cancer care team will compare the risks linked with the cancer itself to the risks of the transplant. They may also talk to you about other treatment options or clinical trials. Here are some questions you might want to ask. Be sure to express all your concerns and get answers you understand. Transplant is a complicated process. Find out as much as you can and plan ahead before you start. Ask about these factors and how they affect the expected outcomes of your transplant or other treatment.

Many people get a second opinion before they decide to have a stem cell transplant. You may want to talk to your doctor about this, too. Also, call your health insurance company to ask if they will pay for a second opinion before you go.

You might also want to talk with them about your possible transplant, and ask which transplant centers are covered by your insurance. Stem cell transplants cost a lot, and some types cost more than others. For example, getting a donor's cells costs more than collecting your own cells. And, different drug and radiation treatments used to destroy bone marrow can have high costs.

Some transplants require more time in the hospital than others, and this can affect cost. Even though there are differences, stem cell transplants can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. A transplant or certain types of transplants is still considered experimental for some types of cancer, especially some solid tumor cancers, so insurers might not cover the cost.

In this view, cancer cells that are not stem cells can cause problems, but they cannot sustain an attack on our bodies over the long term. The idea that cancer is primarily driven by a smaller population of stem cells has important implications. For instance, many new anti-cancer therapies are evaluated based on their ability to shrink tumors, but if the therapies are not killing the cancer stem cells, the tumor will soon grow back often with a vexing resistance to the previously used therapy.

Another important implication is that it is the cancer stem cells that give rise to metastases when cancer travels from one part of the body to another and can also act as a reservoir of cancer cells that may cause a relapse after surgery, radiation or chemotherapy has eliminated all observable signs of a cancer.

One component of the cancer stem cell theory concerns how cancers arise. In order for a cell to become cancerous, it must undergo a significant number of essential changes in the DNA sequences that regulate the cell.