Blood and Marrow Transplant Options

Transplant options for every child

One of the first questions families ask us is will my child have a donor?

When we meet a child in need of a transplant, we search all available donor options. Doing so means we can quickly find the best solution each child. As a transplant center for the National Marrow Donor Program, Children’s Mercy has access to donor registries throughout the world.

There are two types of transplant:

• Allogeneic transplant is when cells are obtained from someone else. 

• Autologous transplant is when the patient’s own cells are used.
  
  

Types of donors include:

• Matched siblings

• Partially matched related donors (including parents), also called a haploidentical transplant

• Unrelated donors from a volunteer registry

• Umbilical cord blood units
  
  

We can obtain the healthy cells from the donor in different ways. These include:

• Bone marrow – typically taken from the back of the hip bones from the donor

• Peripheral blood - taken from the blood of the donor by using a machine to filter out the stem cells

• Cord blood transplants – using stem cells from donated umbilical cords 

Transplants completed in 2018