What is Stem Cell Treatment for Cancer? How Does It Work?

Author: Vaishnav Kumar

Stem cell treatment is a great revolution in medical history. This treatment might help patients with serious diseases including cancer. It could be unbelievable for a person that his own body cells can help him to get recover from any serious injury or diseases like cancer. So let us have a deep dig to understand stem cells and their contribution in medical treatments

Understanding stem cells

Stem cells are like raw materials of the human body as these cells generate the other body cells with specialized functions. These cells also get divide to form more cells called daughter cells but this division happens only under the right conditions.

Researchers generate the mimic conditions like body to ensure the successful division of stem cells in a lab so that they could generate self-renewal or new stem cells and more specialized cells with specific functions like brain cells, heart muscle cells, bone cells or blood cells. These are unique quality cells of the body as no other cells have a natural ability to generate new cells.

Among all stem cells, blood-forming stem cells are really important as they generate other types of blood cells as mentioned below

  • White blood cells that are part of the immune system of the body and help the body to fight against any infection
  • Red blood cells that ensure the proper flow of oxygen throughout the body
  • Platelets

All the above-mentioned blood cells are important for a person to stay healthy. But if talk about stem cells treatment for cancer then these stem cells are transplanted in the cancer patients so that their blood-forming stem cells could be restored that generally get destroyed after chemotherapy or radiation therapy.

Types of Stem Cell Treatment

During stem cell treatment, Dr. Anand Srivastava (stem cells treatment expert) injects healthy blood-forming stem cells through a needle in the veins of the cancer patient. Through the bloodstream, these cells travel to the bone marrow of the patient to replace the cells that were destroyed during chemotherapy or radiation therapy.

Donor stem cells can be taken from bone marrow, bloodstream or umbilical cord depending on the quality and quantity of cells. The donor of these cells can be patient itself or someone else so depending on the source of these donor cells this treatment can be divided into three types as below

  1. Autologous stem cell treatment is the type in which donor stem cells are taken from the patient itself.
  2. Allogeneic stem cell treatment is the type in which donor stem cells are taken from someone else. This donor can be a blood relative or someone else whose bone marrow gets matched with the patient.
  3. Syngeneic stem cell treatment is the type in which stem cell s are taken from the identical twin of the patient.
How Stem Cell Treatment for Cancer works?

Stem cells offer great promise for cancer treatment; however, this treatment does not work against cancer directly. But stem cell treatment helps the cancer patients to recover their ability to produce new stem cells after chemotherapy or radiation therapy.

In multiple myeloma and some type of leukemia, this treatment may directly work against cancer with the occurrence of Graft versus tumor effect. In this effect, white blood cells from the graft mean from donor stem cells attack the tumor means cancer cells that remain in the patient’s body even after chemotherapy or radiation therapy. Due to this attack success of the treatment get improved and even patient get to recover faster.

Stem cell treatment is very effective and safe but if taken by highly professional and expert doctors like Dr. Anand Srivastava as it needs great experience to transplant healthy and high-quality stem cells to treat serious diseases like cancer.

To know more about Cancer Treatment and Stem Cell Therapy in India visit our website : giostar.com