Question: sorry i missed a few words out last time hello i am Tyler i would like to know if you know anything about bone marrow transplant and if you do can you tell me if the operation is painful and how long it could take to start working its magic

Marianne Baker answered on 15 Jun 2010:

Hey Tyler,

Sorry it’s taken me ages to reply, I’m still getting used to the layout of the site!

Bone marrow transplants, sure – we do them in the lab sometimes actually (with our mice).

There are many reasons someone might need a transplant. The most common one is probably cancer of the blood (which actually aren’t the cancers I work on).

In these cases, someone’s bone marrow cells (which divide to create all of your blood cells; red ones, white ones and platelets) divide out of control and don’t function like they should, so we have to kill all the bone marrow. This is done with radiation.

Then, when a donor is found, their bone marrow cells are given to the person without marrow and we hope that the cells ‘engraft’ – go where they’re supposed to, settle down and start growing again. We still don’t really understand how this works! But as you say, it’s pretty magic that it does.

Having your bone marrow taken from the hip can be very painful, yes. The needle is huge!
But nowadays there’s another way we can get marrow cells. People are injected with drugs that make their cells divide more than usual and go out into the blood stream, circulating around the body.

Then, we can just collect the blood, purify out the cells, and give these to the recipient of the transplant.

This is a much less traumatic procedure for the donor. Maybe this website would be useful too: http://www.nhsbt.nhs.uk/bonemarrow/
🙂