How can a patient receive their own stem cells, wouldn these stem cells be damaged or defective?
True, a patient with a blood cancer like leukemia cannot receive their own stem cells because the bone marrow and peripheral blood are contaminated with cancer cells (although, new techniques are becoming available to “filter out” cancer cells). In other types of cancers, the bone marrow cells are normal, but are destroyed by intense chemo and radiation used to treat the cancer. Thus, they are harvested before the intense chemo/radiation, frozen, and reinfused after treatment to rescue the bone marrow which has been damaged by the treatment.
