What patients are saying

"Every day I wake up and thank God that I'm here for another day that I can be with my children."

Alan Richie
Treated for cancer

Conditions Treated with Cell Therapy

Cell therapy is one of the more exciting fields in medicine today, with many researchers interested in the potential of stem cells to treat a variety of diseases and conditions. Cell therapy using blood stem cells is already in use today. The COBE® Spectra Apheresis System is used to collect peripheral stem cells used to treat patients.

(Disease and disorder definitions sourced from webmd.com and emedicine.com)

Stem cell therapy is currently used as part of treatment regimens for:

  • Cancer
  • Sickle cell disease
  • Multiple sclerosis
  • Congenital immune diseases

Sometimes these stem cells are from autologous collections, where the patient's own stem cells are collected for transfusion. Autologous transfusions usually occur when a patient has a solid tumor or hematological malignancies where the tumor load has been minimized.

Allogeneic transfusions make use of stem cells donated by someone else. In these cases, the first choice for a donor is an HLA-matched family member. For those patients with an identical twin, stem cells collected from the healthy twin and transfused to the patient twin are called syngeneic. 

White blood cells as therapy

Patients with reduced white cell counts have difficulty fighting off infections and disease. This sometimes happens with cancer patients undergoing aggressive treatment and with HIV-infected patients.

Granulocyte collections from healthy donors are transfused to patients with a decreased granulocyte level, dysfunctional granulocytes, or neutropenic patients. Neutropenia causes a patient's white cell count to drop significantly, making it difficult for the patient to fight off infection.

Donor lymphocyte infusions are lymphocytes collected from the donor of a stem cell graft. These get transfused to the patient/graft recipient to combat or prevent a relapse of the cancer under treatment.

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