Who needs a bone marrow transplant?

Who needs a bone marrow transplant?

Paul Travers (Deputy Director of Research) gives expert video advice on: What is bone marrow?; Who needs a bone marrow transplant?; Why do you need more donors and who can become a donor? and more...

People who need bone marrow transplants are usually people who have serious life-threatening diseases of the blood. And in general, those patients have cancers of the blood such as leukaemia or lymphomas. In some cases it could be patients who have immune deficiency diseases. They have inherited a deficiency in immune cells and so they need to have replaced normal immune cells. In some cases it can be an auto immune disease or other disease which stops the patients normal bone marrow producing blood cells, and that person, if they can't produce their own blood cells, will die unless they get a transplant of the cells able to make new blood cells from somebody else. The majority of people who get bone marrow transplants though, are people with cancers of the blood.