When a Transplant Is Appropriate Bone marrow transplantation is not a procedure that can be recommended lightly. It is a dangerous treatment and is not appropriate in every case. If a patient can be cured with therapy that does not require bone marrow transplantation, that is obviously the easiest approach. If a patient can be cured only with therapy so intense that other organs as well as the bone marrow are lethally damaged, there is no advantage to having a bone marrow transplant, for survival is unlikely anyway because of the organ damage.
But bone marrow transplantation can be uniquely curative for a patient whose cancer could be cured with high-dose therapy that irreversibly damages bone marrow but does not fatally damage any other organ. Some patients who can almost but not quite be cured with standard therapies could cross the "cure threshold" with increased amounts of therapy. With certain malignancies sensitive to chemotherapy and radiation, it is clear that this "window of opportunity" does exist.
